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I'm only half way through the paper, but it's a very interesting read. One thing I don't get though; I'd have thought that the dative case would be very useful, if not essential, to humans living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but the paper seems to suggest that the necessary neural machinery to support the grammatical case only came into existence 70k years ago. What am I misunderstanding here?

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The paper says that Hunter Gatherers existed well before 70,000 years ago, but this genetic mutation enabled the invention of recursive language, particularly spatial preposition. This enabled more abstract communication and planning, so for instance, Romulus and Remus on their first Buffalo hunt, dug a pit and covered it with branches in a location where the buffalo would naturally run to, when chased. They trapped far more buffalo than the typical zero or at most one - of traditional chase and spear method - ie they were far more successful than anyone before them. The benefit of this enhanced collaboration far outweighed the cost of slower brain development in children, so the mutation rapidly spread and dominated.

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