I guess evolutionary change is gradual so it's hard to have a cut off date for when pre homo sapien ancestors had kids that counted as homo sapiens. The origins of cooking going back 1.9 million years implies the ancestors must have been a bit human like. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/22/cooking-orig...

Evolution is not single speed. For a relatively static population with no need to change their lifestyle it will run more slowly. For a dynamic population with bottlenecks it can run very quickly.

Not only that, their divergence date (cca 175kya-200kya), combined with the fact that they have language, culture and art disproves the 'behavioral modernity' theory which posits that human brains evolved to use language and produce culture and art relatively recently (30kya) based on the oldest currently available archeological finds of expressions of culture/art.

Do you know if they are related to the Berbers?

Well, we are all related to each other, the only question is how _closely_ related we are. And as for that, any non-Khoisan/non-Pygmy human subgroup is more closely related to any other non-Khoisan/non-Pygmy subgroup than they are to Khoisan or Pygmy people. In other words, Khoisan and Pygmyies are the most distant cousins to all other homo sapiens (diverged from us 175-200 thousand years ago).

Seems rather unlikely, given their appearance.