>>Apparently many North American indian cultures had no word/concept for TIME. ...
>>But I somehow see a concept of TIME as critical for the kind of stuff you're talking about. I think that recognizing time and then doing things to accommodate/abbreviate/extend time is the important distinction.
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>You're referring to the Hopi Indians, their concept of time made famous thanks to the Whorf Hypothesis.
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>http://www.humanevolution.net/a/hopi.html
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>That is interesting, and I actually looked into when I was starting to investigate how my intuition towards time differed from the standard dimensional view our society inherited from the Greeks.
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>But that's not quite relevant to what I'm refering to as the Cultural Explosion. Here's the question (paraphrased from another source):
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>more than 2,000,000 years between Advanced Australopithecus and Neanderthal, and the tools of these two groups—sharp stones—were virtually alike—and the two groups as they are believed to have looked—were hardly distinguishable.
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>the suddenly, some 35,000 years ago homo sapiens appeared and swept neanderthals off the map.
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>these homo sapiens—cro-magnons—were the creators of cave art—cavemen.
>they roamed freely, they knew how to build shelters, and for millions of years Man’s tools had been stones of useful shape—yet cro-magnons made specialized tools and weapons of wood and bone.
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>so, how is it that after 2,000,000 years of being naked apes, without much change, did we suddenly become creatures that made art and weapons?
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>The explosion in question took place approximately 35,000 years ago. If I am not mistaken, native Americans only migrated over the Bering Strait 20,000 years ago, so they would not be isolated from what we're talking about.

But I think there's some confusion here.
35,000 years ago there may have been cave art, but there isn't evidence of much more.
In fact it was only something around 6,000 years ago that things really started to take off from an art/weapons point of view.
I'd say that, for sure, the intervening 29,000 years had to have a question or two asked.
I wonder if the wheel came about because someone asked "how can I make something move easier" or if it might have been "how can I get this to there faster".
I used the American indians because their culture, paralleling Europe's and Asia's in the timeline, evolved significantly "slower" from the art/tools point-of-view. Maybe it was their non-urgency about time that brought this about, compared to the others I mentioned who essentially were driven, I feel strongly, by TIME in their endeavours. Shortening the time for necessities allowed time for the more creative endeavours.

If time is excluded from critical thought then a huge part of what is thought about simply disappears. One doesn't think of how to plow the field faster so that there is time to make some beer. One doesn't think about how to get the harvest in quicker in order to be better prepared for winter. One doesn't think about how beating the enemy to a narrow in the river can give superiority in a battle. Etc., ad infinitum.

I won't go so far as to say time is THE answer, but it sure looks to me that it is a far more realistic altrnative than asking questions.

By the way, I think the jury is still out as to whether Neanderthals and their cousins were actually wiped off the map. There seems to be growing evidence that they may have merged.

cheers