These are questions to test, not conclusions. Each broad claim appears beside evidence that narrows or challenges it, and a possible next test.
Ohalo II (DHP-008) shows intensive wild-plant use before domestication; Xianrendong (DHP-012) places pottery in foraging contexts; Göbekli Tepe (DHP-004) complicates a single farming-to-monument sequence.
Secure sequences where cultivation, settlement and construction can be independently dated; regional comparisons rather than one global ladder.
Bizmoune (DHP-001) has personal ornaments, Blombos (DHP-002) engraved ochre and beads, and Leang Karampuang (DHP-003) figurative imagery: these are different forms, not instances of one identifiable universal motif. Their meanings are not decoded.
First identify a narrowly defined motif, then find it in independently dated intermediary populations with plausible contact routes and contextual matches. A shared sacred interpretation remains a separate test.
Ornaments, burial, transported materials, images and coordinated construction occur long before either. This is already a counterexample to that categorical claim.
Define a particular practice and compare it across sites; avoid using “complex” as a single unmeasured trait.
Bouldnor Cliff (DHP-005) is a submerged site with evidence of human activity, but its known material does not establish a city or state; Cape Bruguieres (DHP-009) further shows how object movement can produce an ancient-looking findspot without a securely dated occupation.
Stratified, datable underwater contexts with human-built features and material traces of the proposed social organization.
Ngurunderi (DHP-010) has several narrative layers and multiple possible referents. A landscape event has its own date, while the account and its transmission have different histories.
Details independently unavailable to later observers, robust versions documented with community participation, and explicit alternative tests.
Ust’-Ishim (DHP-015) documents admixture but has no attached account of language, cosmology or remembered encounter.
Contextual material and securely linked historical or linguistic evidence; ancestry alone cannot answer the cultural question.
A missing find can count against a claim only when preservation and investigation make it reasonable to expect that find. A specific counterexample can defeat a universal claim without ruling out a narrower regional pattern.
