Human cultural capacities are older than 170,000 years

Researchers at Stockholm University have used methodology from evolutionary biology together with observations from genetics, paleoanthropology, archaeology and linguistics to determine that human capacities for culture must be more than 170,000 years old. Thereby they end a long debate concerning the age of uniquely human cognition. The debate has centered on whether unique human capacities for culture evolved as late as 40,000 years ago, which is the dating of the oldest cultural artifacts found in Europe, or if they evolved much earlier.