[dubyagee]

According to archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood, of the Iziko-South African Museum in Cape Town, the tools show that people in Africa exhibited "modern" behaviour as far back as 80-100,000 years ago.

Okay, I'll bite. So these guys were intelligent enough to exhibit "modern" behavior and yet the first written forms of language date back to what? 30,000 years, maybe. What's the date on some of the earliest written communications. Why such a gap???

[eno_]

Probably because earlier examples have not survived. If humans were anatomically "modern" 70,000 years ago, why should you expect them to be cognitively that different? I suspect there are layers of pre-Egyptian civilizations yet to be discovered, or, at least, their presence inferred.

[Junior]

The first written communications go back only 5,000 years. Prior to that people drew pictures and such, but there was no systematic system of writing. Writing evidently developed specifically to keep track of things, such as taxes and business deals, and humans had to develop civilization, government and trade before such records had to be kept.