[JimSEA]

The idea that suddenly, twenty to sixty thousand years ago, man suddenly discovered speech, painting on cave walls and jewelry and became modern has always left me cold. Part of the reason is the discoveries such as this one and many in South Africa of modern behavior going back, in some cases, more than two hundred thousand years. The rest of the reason is the curious fact that physically man has has the capacity for speech for some two million years. Are we to believe this capacity has laid dormant until sixty thousand years ago. No, we like to gossip too much for it to be a recent development.

[varmintman]

The idea that suddenly, twenty to sixty thousand years ago, man suddenly discovered speech, painting on cave walls and jewelry and became modern has always left me cold.

It should leave you cold, it's a bunch of BS. Cro Magnon man arrived on this planet fully capable of everything he ever did from day one, that says you're looking at some sort of a saltation and not evolution.

One version of a saltation theory which has turned up recently

[BenLurkin]

A derived form of MCPH1 called haplogroup D appeared about 37,000 years ago (any time between 14,000 and 60,000 years ago) and has spread to become the most common form throughout the world except Sub-Saharan Africa; this rapid spread suggests a selective sweep.[9][10] However, scientists have not identified the evolutionary pressures that may have caused the spread of these mutations.[11] Modern distributions of chromosomes bearing the ancestral forms of MCPH1 and ASPM are correlated with the incidence of tonal languages, but the nature of this relationship is far from clear.[12]

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