Perhaps a better term than "close to...space exploration" would be "having a syntactic language." Humans of 10k years ago certainly had that, as probably did h

Perhaps a better term than "close to...space exploration" would be "having a syntactic language." Humans of 10k years ago certainly had that, as probably did humans at least 4x that long ago. I think that's a pre-requisite for developing any kind of civilization that will develop technology. And no, as far as anyone has been able to determine, neither birds, whales, dolphins nor apes have anything like a syntactic language, or even our vocabulary.