Well, yes - anatomically (and to a large degree, intellectually) we're probably indistinguishable from homo sapiens of 300k years ago. In Yuval Noah Harari's b

Well, yes - anatomically (and to a large degree, intellectually) we're probably indistinguishable from homo sapiens of 300k years ago. In Yuval Noah Harari's book 'Sapiens - a Brief History of Humankind' he posits that there was a 'cognitive revolution' about 70k years ago, during which our cognitive & language capabilities moved beyond the purely physical observations, to the more abstract & metaphysical. This allowed for a shedload of cultural changes -- larger societies, the birth of religions / mythologies, money, etc. All those abstract concepts that work when we all agree they exist even if they actually don't. To your question - yes, we necessarily only have written history from civilisations that wrote things down (and those things survived), but it seems like there was an evolutionary change that meant we could finally leverage our one distinctly useful skill, coordinating large groups of people at scale, by getting us all to adopt a shared reality that didn't exist yet. (This kind of explains why we adopted agriculture, despite it clearly being a bad idea at the time.)