The conventional story of civilisation is elegant in its clarity and reassuring in its simplicity. For the vast majority of our species’ existence, we are told, Homo sapiens lived in small, mobile bands, operating within the ecological constraints of hunting and gathering, until the Neolithic transition, beginning roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, introduced agriculture, sedentism, and eventually urban life. From this agricultural foundation emerged cities, writing, statecraft, and the recognisable forms of “civilisation” that appear in Mesopotamia around 3,500 BCE and subsequently in Egypt, the Indus Valley, and northern China. This model is not incorrect. However, it is increasingly apparent that it is incomplete. What recent decades of archaeological, palaeoenvironmental, and genetic research have revealed is not a dramatic overthrow of chronology, nor evidence of some forgotten technological super-culture, but rather something more subtle and, in many respects, more profound: that the social, symbolic, and organisational foundations upon which civilisation rests extend far deeper into prehistory than the emergence of cities and writing would suggest. If civilisation is understood not merely as urban density or bureaucratic administration but as sustained, large-scale symbolic cooperation across extended networks of communities, then its origins are not five millennia old. They are tens of millennia deep. The Cognitive Foundations: Symbol Before Stone Any serious reconsideration of civilisation’s origins must begin not with architecture but with cognition, because no monument, however large, can exist without shared systems of meaning capable of organising human effort across time. At Blombos Cave in South Africa, engraved ochre fragments dated to approximately 75,000 BCE exhibit deliberate cross-hatched patterns that cannot be explained as incidental markings. These engravings represent abstraction, and abstraction implies a capacity to encode meaning beyond immediate survival needs. Symbolic thought of this sophistication requires shared conventions, transmission across generations, and social continuity.