Sapiens is super loose about interpreting facts carefully, particularly the prehistory part.

I'm currently reading that book, and I find this sentiment interesting (not knowing any better myself) - is there a critique/fact-check somewhere?

There are some blog posts by experts in the various fields that I read. An AI can find them if you ask (I don't remember specifics). TLDR; the facts aren't necessarily wrong (with some exceptions IIRC), but the author presents things with extreme confidence when the scientific consensus is much less certain. And then builds a confident narrative on top of it.

Agreed. The whole premise of language being created to gossip has zero scientific merit.

Isn't that begging the question? For one, people can wear a lion headdress, making it something that does exist in real life. Secondly, it seems to be carved from a single tusk, which might have forced some choices when it comes to anatomy, rather than being "as conceived".

Heh. "What does it signify, this lion with a man's body?" - "ran out of space".

But that's also just ignoring the fact that humans seem inherently drawn to the fantastic, whether in religion or something else. There isn't really any reason to believe that wouldn't have existed 40k years ago, correct?

That's what they mean by begging the question; you don't really get much useful information from trying to cite something as evidence of what you've already assumed.

This is the earliest evidence of such fantasy we have. It's not that this piece at this time was the earliest human fantasy, but there is a cutoff line somewhere between humans and our last common ancestor chimpanzees.

Wouldn't you be wearing a lion headdress for some kind of symbolic reason though? Like it's not a very practical piece of clothing. I would guess you either want to draw some kind of parallel between yourself and lions, or maybe remind people that you're strong enough to have killed a lion. I don't think there are any animals that take hunting trophies like that.