The submitted article was interesting to me for showing the inventive capacity of an ancestral hominin lineage, which was unknown until the studies reported in the article. Species Homo sapiens, according to the current view reported in the article, goes back the better part of 100,000 years. Most of your genes and mine have been fixed in the human lineage for at least that long.

With "recently" defined as about 6,000 years ago, by then there were several regions of the world with agriculture (different crops in different places) and there was about to be a place (Mesopotamia, specifically Sumer) with actual writing rather than just proto-writing. Both of those innovations made "civilization" (living in cities) much more feasible than before. And it does appear that living in cities prompts many other kinds of social changes. Human beings over the last several thousand years have progressed by acculturation and by writing down knowledge acquired by other individuals much more rapidly than any human lineage has ever progressed by shuffling genes.