68,000–20,000 BCE: (Global History Period One — The Initial Long Historical Period Beginning with the Emergence in Eastern Africa of the Fully Modern Human A…

68,000–20,000 BCE: (Global History Period One — The Initial Long Historical Period Beginning with the Emergence in Eastern Africa of the Fully Modern Human Ancestors of All of Us Alive Today and Their Spread Eventually Around the Globe, the Defining Characteristic Being the Acquisition of Full Capacities for Syntactic Language Probably in the Two or Three Thousand Years Immediately Preceding 68,000 BCE, Conferring the Ability to Build Abstract Interpretive Structures, to Conceive of Things Not Physically Experienced, and to Imaginatively Build Structures of Meaning): Applying the proposed perspectives of Ehret’s culture-centered approach to world history leads to distinguishing an initial, long historical period from around 68,000 to 20,000 BCE. This period began with the initial emergence in eastern Africa of the fully modern human ancestors of all of us alive today. From those ancestral regions, our common ancestors then spread out, eventually around the globe, as well as across the rest of the African continent. The defining characteristic for becoming fully modern humans, and also the primary enabling factor for this vast expansion, was their acquisition of the full capacities for syntactic language, a development probably of the two or three thousand years immediately preceding 68,000 BCE. This transformative shift conferred on our common ancestors the ability to build abstract interpretive structures for dealing with other people and with the world around them; to conceive of things not physically experienced and not seen; and to imaginatively build structures of meaning for coming to terms with factors beyond human control. There is a chasm of difference between the ability, likely possessed by the Neanderthals and Denisovans and by all the various archaic hominins of Africa, to make a wide variety of communicative utterances about things seen or actions taken, and the quite different ability of fully modern humans to put words, and thus ideas, together in the endless variety that the capacity for syntax allows. Syntax is what makes abstraction possible, and abstraction is what makes civilization possible, and this capacity was born in Africa.