The Rubicon Crossing: The Evolution of Language

Is Homo Heidelberg the best candidate for roughly time stamping the emergence of culture, or did it happen earlier? I think there's a case to be made that the cumulative cultural evolution goes back much further. Just what we may have been seeing was fits and starts. So you may have had a period of cultural increasingly complex tools, say, and knowledge, but then a shock or weather pattern or some eruption, something hits,. And then the group breaks down and loses a lot of cultural information.