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Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

> it would show humans at the time had the capacity for abstract thinking

This was 50,000 years ago, they were Homo Sapiens, we are 200,000 years old. We can see abstract thinking through the advancement of our early tools and through linguistic studies that trace lineage of abstract language patterns to points in time using archeological knowledge of migration periods. So this confirms it further I guess.

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The "Upper Paleolithic Revolution" hypothesis proposes that around 50,000 years ago, there was some sort of a qualitative jump in human behavioral complexity, based on the fact that around that time we start seeing clear evidence of cultural and symbolic behavior such as rock art and burial rituals, and also of a period of rapid innovation in toolbuilding. Critics of the hypothesis counter that the apparent jump could just as well be merely a selection effect caused by the scarcity of evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity

> This was 50,000 years ago, they were Homo Sapiens, we are 200,000 years old.

I don’t know enough about the migration of human species and subspecies. Was this concluded in the article that they were Home Sapiens and not Neanderthals or Denisovans (or interbred between these and Homo Sapiens)? The latter two were around 50,000 years ago.

There's quite a bit of evidence that Homo sapiens, denisovans, and floresiensis might have coexisted in Sundaland (the land mass containing much of Indonesia before the oceans rose and created the SEA islands) at the time but the cave art is more consistent with Homo sapiens in the rest of the world than either of the other two. That's the default conclusion until more artwork conclusively belonging to other species is discovered.

denisovans, neanderthals, and their hybrids are not out of the picture for that time period and location

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