Could we please go back to the time when the spear was the latest must have tool!
Perhaps I have an underactive imagination, but I can't envision such a time. You clearly can. And so vividly that it is a virtual certainty to you, on which much else hinges. Therein lies the rub.
Forgetting Clovis (and along with it, that replication experiments demonstrate that its width dimensions and hafting arrangement make it ideally suited to use as an atlatl dart point), the record shows atlatl hooks in European contexts far older than would have been imagined possible a few years ago. Compound this with atlatl use in Australia and other similarly isolated locations which were peopled early on, and (presumably) not in regular contact with the world outside for the latest technological updates.
Unlike quantum leap advances like making fire using sticks and friction, "If my arm were longer, I could throw this further and harder" is not an insight that would have required a paleolithic DaVinci to come up with, and the practical details would have been a matter of a few trials to get the hang of the parameters.
Beautifully crafted and sophisticated stone tools were only necessary to people who considered them necessary, and many didn't. They do indicate what people were capable of, but their absence is no indication of inherent incapacity. More to the point, like the atlatl, basketry was important nearly everywhere, and was accordingly made nearly everywhere. Some of the most strikingly expert examples of it were made by the Digger Indians of the Western US desert, who had one of the continent's most impoverished technological repertoires otherwise. Thus, for me, the
presumed correlation between intelligence (a.k.a., "fitness") and technological sophistication (with sharp stones and pointy sticks as the hypothetical baseline) doesn't flush.
The more I ponder it, the more apparent it seems that the intransigent, unremitting insistence by Darwinians that people in the past be imaged as primitive and stupid is because if they weren't, the whole scheme would collapse. It's not unlike wartime propaganda that paints the enemy as improbably subhuman and vile for the sake of creating a starker contrast than honestly exists (when there even is one at all).
Sure,
IF human beginnings were monkeys coming down from the trees with only teeth and fingernails to start with,
THEN the Darwinian scheme appears plausible. But the implausibility of the predicatory
IF, when considered, removes it (at least for me) from the realm of safe assumption.
That there is no more satisfying model of human origins seems, again on this end, equally irrelevant. The evidence on which such a reconstruction would necessarily depend is so sparse, so open to interpretation and so fragmentary, that presuming to synthesise the bits and scraps we have into a coherent picture (and with a plot line no less) requires leaps of faith at least as large as the habitually cried-down "creationism" does, and both founder on the same objection : that the entire hinges on the hypothetical which is incapable of proof.
Nobody knows. Nobody at this point is in any position to. I can live with that.