I am working my way through a rather huge but very interesting book on the history of the chemistry and archaeobiology of beer and brewing published by the Royal Society of Chemists so my mind, more than the usual, is focused on folk who lived with wood and stone and skins. Which Makes for an easy one step back further to the days of the Neanderthal which, as they ended only 30,000 years ago, is a lot closer than you would guess from most of the water cooler talk:

The Neanderthals, who flourished for some 400,000 years before their extinction about 30,000 years ago, physically resembled modern humans, but the middle of their face jutted forward and their large brain case had a distinctive bulge or bun at the back. They were heavily muscled and presumably well adapted to the cold conditions of the last ice age. They may well have been terrifying to the lighter-boned modern humans who first encountered them, except that their weapons were considerably less advanced. The Neanderthals still used a million-year-old stone tool kit that modern humans abandoned 5,000 years before they encountered the Neanderthals. Archaeologists have shown that as the first modern humans, known as the Aurignacian culture, moved westward across Europe, the Neanderthals receded in parallel. By 30,000 years ago or even earlier, the Aurignacian conquest of Europe was complete and the Neanderthals had disappeared from their last refuges in what are now Spain and Portugal.