This is pretty amazing for a few reasons IMO. This is a history altering revelation that likely would never have been achieved had it not come from outside the assumptions of the “scientists” who study archaeology/anthropology. (I have scientists in quotes here because both of these topics are built almost entirely on conjecture, with nearly no ability to validate their speculation directly).
It’s a good look at the potential of what open science could offer, to really harness the collective processing power of our species to solve problems. Unfortunately a lot of work like this is bound by consensus, so it’s great to see something so compelling that it illustrates how weak evidence most consensus is built on actually is.
It’s also a pretty cool illustration of how silly a lot of our cultural arrogances are, the idea that ancient means less capable, that because a society didn’t look like ours that it’s people were less developed. It’s pretty likely that we could transplant a human from 30k years ago and they’d actually be able to acclimate in modern society pretty well, especially if they were infants/children.
What’s most frustrating to me is that no one will look at this work and ask the question “How did we get it so wrong?” We’ll simply retcon the collective understanding and plow forward, making the same potential mistakes. Perhaps that ability is the real killer feature of homo sapien development, the ability to create social group sizes which far exceed any other complex vertebrate by constantly re-writing our past, creating dynastic instability that other hominids are bound to.
This work adds a significant amount of evidence that ancient human societies were fundamentally similar to modern ones, the key difference between them is available technology. This makes me a bit hopeful about our potential in another 40,000 years of technological development (especially since advances seem to be closer to logarithmic than exponential or additive).