Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated to be 11k-13k years old
What gets me about prehistory is that even before <i>civilization</i> (the development of permanent settlements), humans existed in anatomically modern form, and even if they never wrote anything down, would surely still have used language. What did they talk about? We know that illiterate people today are perfectly capable of forming complex thoughts and reasoning. When did those thoughts first emerge? Somebody must have been the first to look up and the stars and wonder. They could have done more than just wonder. There could have been geniuses and villains and poets and master storytellers, long before they had any capability to preserve their culture through writing. And this was probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before the earliest stone remains that we call civilization.