Gerry, you wrote to Glen's post

> >No firm date. I'd guestimate something on the order of
> >40,000 to 60,000 years. But this is certainly still not
> >the "first language". Think of it as the language of
> >one of Mitochondrial Eve's descendents.
>
> Oh? This puts it somewhere in the middle of Neanderthal
> (Mousterian) but the dates differ for geographic locations:

Not at all. Whilst Neanderthal Mousterian existed in the area from
Western Europe to Tesik Tash, the rest of the world was being
colonised by good aold Hss. We have non Mousterian Hss in northern
Australia dated 63,000 BCE. We need to be careful about applying the
names of European cultural assemblages to non-European locations.

Gerry wrote

> So much for Mousterian; but hey, what happens when some noteworthy
> paleoanthrolologist like C. Loring Brace eliminates Neanderthal all
> together and instead claims that they are simply robust Homo
> sapiens.

Loring is still not universally accepted on this matter.

Regards

John