This New York Times article on the “Great Leap Forward” is a pretty good survey of the issues at hand. As stated, “anatomically modern humans” existed in Africa 100,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until ~50,000 years B.P. that there was a ratchet up toward the hallmarks of modern sapiency. The breakneck speed of cultural evoution and the profusion of forms & styles that characterize our species seems to have lagged our outward humanity by tens of thousands of years.
What was the catalyst? Some theorists posit that an important regulatory gene-FOXP2-played a crucial role, in particular, in the development of the capacity for language. I’m pretty agnostic on this issue. Dr. Henry Harpending has indicated that it might be that not all modern humans made the cultural transition in toolkits that characterizes the “Great Leap,” suggesting that if modern humans are genetically very similar (the result of a radiative expansion from African 50,000 years ago), it is more than just an alteration in in the FOXP2 gene in the African context.
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