People:

Herein, your posit is, that we should look towards the Brain’s software rather than morphology with regards defining what is human? Neolithic monoliths would suggest a high level of understanding architecture and astronomy at least alluding to representation and language.

Speech:

H.G. Wells, as an historian, notes that there may have been a proto-Aryan language, which led to Sanskrit, placing it 8,000 BP. What is interesting is the Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, Negro and Ural-Altaic, Chinese and Amerindian language groups all have no clear origin point.

What is clear is that given margins of error of 50%-100%, on yiur posit, there is little if no evidence of say semantic speech 20,000 BP., long after the origin of genus homo sapien sapien.

I am not well read on the philologies of the Neolithic.

Adam:

The longevity, if literal, as stated in Genesis is problematic. It is the reason I discounted Sumerian pre-6000 BP accounts. Similar style.
Were we to allow the Genesis account, it would seem reasonable to include parallel accounts of people living hundreds or thousands of years from Sumer.

Sumer:

Sumer is interesting in that it appears very quickly, too quickly, to the puzzlement of many, wherein it has been suggested the precursor civilization could under the Mediterranean.

- I will be offline for a few days with my own research-

RE:"H.G. Wells, as an historian, notes that there may have been a proto-Aryan language, which led to Sanskrit, placing it 8,000 BP. What is interesting is the Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, Negro and Ural-Altaic, Chinese and Amerindian language groups all have no clear origin point."

Sanscrit is not that old. This below is an exaggerated report, while we have no actual sancrit manuscipts of any kind prior to 400 BCE:

http://www.viewzone.com/ancientsanskrit.htm

Although its exact birth date is controversial, many scholars agree that Sanskrit may be one of the oldest languages and systems of writing on earth. Even if we consider the later date attributed to classical Sanskrit (1000 B.C.E.) it becomes apparent that the dating of Sanskrit or its Indo-Aryan predecessor language could possibly coincide with the appearance of the Sanskrit look-alike pictograph at Palatki.

Dating
Due to the ephemeral nature of the manuscript material (birch bark or palm leaves), surviving manuscripts rarely surpass an age of a few hundred years. The oldest surviving manuscripts of the Rigveda are dated to the 11th century CE.[citation needed]. The Benares Sanskrit University has a manuscript of the mid-14th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas

Michael Witzel gives a time span of c. 1500 BCE to c. 500-400 BCE. Witzel makes special reference to the Mitanni material of ca. 1400 BCE as the only epigraphic record of Indo-Aryan that may date to the Rigvedic period. However Mitanni Indo-Aryan is linguistically slightly older than the language of the Rigveda, and the comparison thus still does not allow for an absolute dating of any Vedic text. He gives 150 BCE (Patanjali) as a terminus ante quem for all Vedic Sanskrit literature, and 1200 BCE (the early Iron Age) as terminus post quem for the Atharvaveda.[15]

IamJoseph,

Wells was addressing a proto-language but didn't provide details.

Prehistoric:

"Among the oldest and most widely found methods of counting is the use of marked bones. People must have made use of this long before they were able to count in any abstract way.

The earliest archaeological evidence dates from the so-called Aurignacian era (35,000–20,000 BCE), and are therefore approximately contemporary with Cro-Magnon Man. It consists of several bones, each bearing regularly spaced markings, which have been mostly found in Western Europe.

Notched bones from the Upper Palaeolithic age. Amongst these is the radius bone of a wolf, marked with 55 notches in two series of groups of five. This was discovered by archaeologists in 1937, at Dolní Vêstonice in Czechoslovakia, in sediments which have been dated as approximately 30,000 years old. The purpose of these notches remains mysterious, but this bone (whose markings are systematic, and not artistically motivated) is one of the most ancient arithmetic documents to have come down to us. It clearly demonstrates that at that time human beings were not only able to conceive number in the abstract sense, but also to represent number with respect to a base."

[several chapters in between]

Sumer:

"The period from 3200 to 3100 BCE saw, as we have observed, the beginnings of written business accounts.

But from around 3100 BCE as business transactions and distributions of goods became increasingly numerous and varied, the inventories and the accounts for each transaction also grew more complex and voluminous, and the accountants found they had to cut down on the cost of clay. From this time on the pictures and the numbers took up increasing amounts of space on the tablets. Onto a single rectangular sheet of clay, divided into boxes by horizontal and vertical lines, were recorded inventories of livestock in all their different kinds (sheep, fat sheep, lambs, lambkins, ewes, goats, kids male and female or half-grown, etc.) in all necessary detail. A single tablet, too, was used to summarise an agricultural audit in which all the different kinds of species were distinguished." - The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer by Georges Ifrah et al.

Indus and other:

"The most important undeciphered script is that of the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan and northwestern India, since it is the writing of a great civilisation, that of ancient India, c.2500-1800 BC, one of the four `first' civilisations along with those of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. Other undeciphered scripts include Linear A from Crete and the Aegean, which is older than Linear B and probably was the script of King Minos; the Etruscan script of Italy, which is essentially the Greek alphabet but with an underlying language that seems to be unrelated to any other European language; the Zapotec script of Mexico, which predates Mayan and appears to be the oldest writing in the Americas; the Meroitic script of the African kingdom of Meroe (Kush) in today's Nubia, which has at least some resemblance to the hieroglyphs of its northern neighbour Egypt
... " - Deciphering history: Andrew Robinson looks at some linguistic puzzles still facing historians

Comment:

Agree one will not find writing systems before 6,000 BP. Perhaps, accounting systems for one millennia and prehistoric tallying.

Regards.

"It clearly demonstrates that at that time human beings were not only able to conceive number in the abstract sense, but also to represent number with respect to a base."

Oliver, what then is the problem concerning such reportings, and why should one not agree that speech, the unique trait of modern humans, was indeed not as old as those imprints?

Even basic prototype grunts and coos, which would have surely predated use of numbers, would have left easily seen imprints of graduations along the way.
But the only provable example of speech is exclusively within the last 6000 circle - I ask why so? and that we have an ancient document declaring this, with a bold and specific date - a mysterious co-incidence?

I understand the premise of compounding knowledge elevation, and that the last 6000 years show rapid, continual graduations, with writings and maths following each other in very close proximity, and this is contrasted by vast chunks of absolute vacuum between lab assessed alledged finds which are 20K and 30K years apart: where are the grads between non-speech animals and speech endowed humans? - and why the total absence of this graduations outside the 6000 mark?

If you made a timeline graph, showing grunts to the first proof of grammatically elaborate writings [eg. The OT, dated aprox 3500 years ago], you will have such large vacuums, that the notion of any evolutionary grads become unfeasable; in fact you will find that speech emerged suddenly and in an advanced state - which again defies logical occurences, yet remains the only evidence on the table. I would surely like to see that speech, before numbers, being proven, as this would eliminate any confusion.

If primitive speech is 50K years old - it would show imprints of an evolutionary thread, and one of the inescapable items would have to be NAMES - 100s of 1000s of them - all over the planet - and from various periods, each period showing differing styles of names - and these would be in the memory banks of humanity even where writings was absent.

IamJoseph and Peracles[?],

Thank you.

Tallying does not represent productivity:

Productivity is a term used by psycholinguists approximating semantics in English. The words, "ten" and "ten" use the same letters but have different meanings. This state is also true of arithmetic "21" and "12". I or II or III or IIII is more primitive.

[Cites: Chomsky; Slobin]

Wells writing in the first half of the twentieth century, suggested that the human brain does not have a brain centre, That is, not entiring correct, the left cerebral cortex "in most invidividuals ... is specialized for the hand control, language, analytical processes, and certain aspects memory. There are two key areas. Broca's is near the cortical areas that control the "periphal" organs of speech. Broca's area is responsible for speech itself articulation of speech "dependent upon the anatomical charatceristics of the human larynx, pharnyx and oral cavity".

Related to speech is Wenicke's area, a reception area, related auditory association cortex. It is a conduit for hearing the spoken language. What is interesting it often regards/treats "writing", as if a foreign spoken language.

Non-verbal ideation is in the right hemisphere. Circa 6,000 BP, with the establishment of City-States, written "language" developed in addition to natural [primary]spoken "language".

The absence of writing does not negate the existence of non-verbal comprehension nor speech. My loose posit: Writing could have piggy-backed on Wenicke's area, as if a second language?

Cite: Neurology [Gardner]