It's got nothing to do directly with speech origins, but Science magazine has just released information about a 45,000 year old Homo sapiens site found about 250 miles south of Moscow. This is a very early site for a European location.
Most interesting to me is the distance between the source of some tools that have been found and where they were left, as far as 300 miles .... plus of course the world's oldest known representation of a human.
Below are excerpts from the press release on the finding:
The evidence consists of stone, bone and ivory tools discovered under a layer of ancient volcanic ash on the Don River in Russia some 250 miles south of Moscow, ... the site also has yielded perforated shell ornaments and a carved piece of mammoth ivory that appears to be the head of a small human figurine, which may represent the earliest piece of figurative art in the world. ... Most of the stone used for artifact construction was imported from between 60 miles and 100 miles away, while the perforated shell ornaments discovered at the lowest levels of the Kostenki dig were imported from the Black Sea more than 300 miles away. ... Buried under 10 feet to 15 feet of silt, the artifacts at Kostenki include blades, scrapers, drills and awls, as well as sturdy antler digging tools known as mattocks that resemble crude pick-axes
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