[quote postid="3300531" user="nbouscal"]Your argument is terrible. Yes, commerce originated before art, but that doesn't actually mean anything. At all. We developed speech before we developed symbols and writing, woohoo. That says nothing about their respective levels of importance. Keep in mind when you're talking about humans who had trade but not art, you're looking at the range from 200,000 BC to 40,000 BC (or 70,000 BC if you count the stones from Blombos cave). Though the people who lived in that time period were H. sapiens, you cannot draw parallels between their society and ours, it just doesn't make any sense to. Further, your argument is like saying that Proxima Centauri is "more important" than Sol. Age and importance are not the same thing.
Don't get me wrong, I actually agree with you to some extent. I just really hate when people use terrible arguments. :-)[/quote
You definitely misread me, which is understandable: sometimes my phrasing is weird, plain and simple. As to the caliber of my argument, I believe my main point was as Halcyon described.
We can, and do, draw many parallels between the possible cultures of early H. sapiens and modern H. sapiens in an effort to better understand where we have come from, where we are, and where we could possibly be going. This is not to say that drawing these parallels implies our cultures are identical in any way, it is merely a tool used to increase our knowledge of ourselves.
