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I don't think 'anatomically modern' necessarily implies that their brains were evolved to the same level of modern humans; I don't believe there is any hard evi

• denton-scratch 5y ago
  Doesn't "anatomically modern" humans include neanderthals, denizovans and so on? Those people don't seem to have left any cities. I keep coming across the claim that humans have been around for 300,000 years. Based on no knowledge or expertise at all, I'm sceptical. It seems fairly clear that there exist remains of cities 12,000 years old (e.g. Troy); the classical Greeks regarded the stories of the Trojan war as something close to mythology, but then Schliemann found the place. But there don't seem to be stories of ancient civilisations that go back much further than that. I find it difficult to believe that people able to build a civilisation would have existed for tens of thousands of years, without actually building one. But evidence for ancient civilisations is hard to find, so perhaps we just haven't found it yet. So I'm open to the view that humans capable of civilisation-building have been around for (say) 50,000 years. But without evidence, I find it hard to credit the claim that humans from 300,000 years ago were at all like us. I'm ignorant about these matters, and my sketchy opinions are based on stuff I read decades ago. Is there something written for the layman that I could read to inform myself?