Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my opinion.

How do you explain the advancement of cultural practices and tools during the 95% of time (assuming 100k years) that behaviorally modern humans lived prior to inventing writing 5,000 years ago? This includes the invention of agriculture and large scale building projects like Gobleki Tepe and so on. Also, there were cities for thousands of years before writing was invented.

I’m definitely no scholar, just a guy that is interested in prehistory.

I'm not saying there wasn't any cultural advancement prior to the invention of using written language to store information for use by others. Just that there wasn't any human behavior that distinguished it as unique among all other species on earth.

I’m not sure I follow, which other animals have cities and agriculture?