[blam]

"Modern humans appeared, what, 150,000 years ago?"

That's widely accepted, I'm not convinced though.

[VietVet]

Skeletal remains, physically identical to modern human skeletons have been found which are about 100,000 to 150,000 years old. But modern human behavior, inovating, decorating, creating, can be dated only to the last 35,000 to 50,000 years. They did a show on PBS about this 'outbust of creative activity'. At about that time, the Cro-Magnan culture replaced the Neandertals in Europe, and Australia was settled.