68,000–58,000 BCE: (The First Toolmaking Advances of Fully Modern Humans — Bone Harpoon Points the Earliest Found in Parts of Today’s Uganda, and the First S…

68,000–58,000 BCE: (The First Toolmaking Advances of Fully Modern Humans — Bone Harpoon Points the Earliest Found in Parts of Today’s Uganda, and the First Small Stone Points and Small-Backed Blades Found in Kenya and Tanzania Notably at the Mumba Industry Site, This Toolmaking Spreading to Southern Africa Around 63,000 BCE, Full Syntactic Language Also Enabling the Conceptualization and Formalization of Kinship and Marriage Relations as a Basis for Larger Territorial Groupings of Bands and Networks of Cooperative Relations): Syntax is essential to being able to abstract, to classify things and experiences, and to organize one’s knowledge and, from the patterns or the lack of pattern, to conceive the possibility of other things not immediately present. Possessing syntactic language allowed our first fully human ancestors to think about and to talk with each other about the surrounding conditions of their lives. It allowed for planning, for thinking ahead to consequences, for organizing and carrying out cooperative activities, for conceiving of novel things and novel relations among things, for categorizing, for formulating ideas about the meaning of one’s existence, and for conceiving and designing new kinds of cultural objects and, most notably, new kinds of technology. Equally important, the possession of full syntactic language engendered a new scale of social cooperative abilities. It allowed our common ancestors to conceptualize and formalize kinship and marriage relations as a basis for larger territorial groupings of bands and for structuring networks of cooperative relations among those groupings. The size of hunter-gatherer bands and their reciprocal networks in the Later Stone Age contrasts sharply with the very small residential groups, hardly more than small extended families, among the Neanderthals. At the inception of this age, between 68,000 and 58,000 BCE, our first fully modern human ancestors, still all living in eastern Africa, brought into being two particular advances in toolmaking: the fashioning of small tools carved from bone, notably bone harpoon points — the earliest of which have been found in parts of today’s Uganda — and the shaping of the first small stone points and small-backed blades, found similarly early in nearby areas in Kenya and Tanzania, notably in the Mumba industry site of northern Tanzania. Around 63,000 BCE this kind of toolmaking spread also to southern Africa. Every advance was African. Every innovation was African. The first bone tools, the first microlithic stone technology, the first formalized kinship systems, the first cooperative networks larger than the extended family — all of them were born in eastern Africa, among the ancestors of every human being alive today, and from there they spread to the rest of the world.