Absolutely, things moved at a glacial pace back then... literally... since the Pleistocene (2.5 million BC to 11,700 BC) encompassed several ice age pulses -- f

Absolutely, things moved at a glacial pace back then... literally... since the Pleistocene (2.5 million BC to 11,700 BC) encompassed several ice age pulses -- freezes and thaws, over tens of thousands of years. We're currently in the thawing period of the latest ice age, by the way. The ice ages, by the way, would have been quite intense. Over 1/3 of the Earth was covered by frozen ice caps, extending down past Britain to central Germany in Europe, and the Kansas region in the U.S. Imagine if the Arctic were that large. The habitable zones were commensurately smaller, the warm seasons were shorter, and oppressive winters were the norm. People anywhere near the ice caps would have had to adapt to the intense cold, both physiologically and technologically. If you didn't have fire and the means to hunt and take down large fur coated mammals on a regular basis, you died. It's amazing to think that Homo Erectus, the dominant hominid circa 1 million BC, had fire and tools. They were far less advanced than H. Sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis, had smaller brains and smaller physical stature, but would have been fearsomely strong and fast nonetheless. After half a million years, Erectus gave rise to more advanced species so some kind of change and adaptation was occurring, albeit slowly.