I did notice that the popular transition to recast Neanderthals from primitive troglodytes to advanced peers seemed to coincide closely with the revelation that all Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA.
See the timeline on the archaic humans wiki page [1]. The first migration out of Africa and the first use of fire were all millions of years ago. The first stone tools made by Australopithecus predate archaic humans altogether. It really just depends on where you draw the "human" and "civilization" lines.
"Waterlogged deposits at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dated by luminescence to at least 476 ± 23 kyr ago (ka), preserved two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch. "
Neanderthals shared more alleles with Eurasian populations (e.g. French, Han Chinese, and Papua New Guinean) than with sub-Saharan African populations (e.g. Yoruba and San).[8] According to the authors Green et al. (2010), the observed excess of genetic similarity is best explained by recent gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans after the migration out of Africa.[8] They estimated the proportion of Neanderthal-derived ancestry to be 1–4% of the Eurasian genome.