Human Difference Emerged Late in Evolution

For roughly the first four million of six million years hominins were essentially bipedal apes with ape-sized brains; stone tools appear around 2-2.5 million years ago, collaborative foraging less than a million (perhaps half a million) years ago, and culturally distinct groups with conventional language only about 100,000-200,000 years ago—so the genuinely distinctive human capacities emerged fairly late.