Neanderthal is suspected to be almost as intelligent as early man and he was around for two hundred thousand years, in the end breeding with humans, possibly influencing humans in some way at the time. And what about all the other races before? We'll never know the true process of verbal knowledge evolution and culture preservation in prehistoric world without writing and records of any kind but stone tools. Its safe to say that 'culture' started anew with humanity turning to cattle, inventing thunder gods and all the other ones, then agriculture and all the beliefs connected with observation of the sky and the cycle of things.
Frankly I don't believe that someone growing crops in prehistoric Europe 2500 BC could even conceive of the concept of humans living as hunters gatherers or even anything 200 years ago with some precision, let alone other races ever existing or even big cities in the east or pyramids being built even in their own time. Equally I don't believe anything of that is still left in any of those languages. Oldest words in the world are words such as mother, father, earth (ground), milk, sun etc. and are mostly Indoeuropean generally in origin.
Those nuggets of extremely old past seem to be saved in those earliest places of civilization in the form of very vague myths. As far as I know, myth of Eden, Kain, Abel becoming shepards and farmers has origin in Sumeria, but interpretating it in such a way might be a stretch.
Only in the 19th century humans realized that not only they once lived as hunters gatherers, but the fact there were other races before them. That is profound. They lived in the dark for...well, actually since forever because nobody could tell what the hell happened 100 years ago before they were born and they tend to turn into myths people their great grandfathers might've known. Imagine the might of the name Caesar in the middle ages. Imagine what would the name Hitler mean to Europeans 100 years after 1945 if we had no media, internet and informations were spreading slowly along the few dangerous roads. This sort of reminds me of the way my great-great-granparents lived, possibly without ever seeing a book other than the Bible which they couldn't read anyway. They spent their lives in the field and dirt, yet they and their illiterate parents knew the names of Napoleon, Charlemagne, Alexander etc.
Roman records were re-discovered in the monasteries during the reinnissance which slowly started the era of questioning because it gave us that grasp on our past.
Without records, we literally wouldn't be able to know anything. Everything before the Sumerian tablets is pure speculation, but that's not history, nothing is left from it. They rely on contemporary interpretations instead of hard evidence. Reconstruction of the myths from 5000 BC years ago based on the way people constructed mythology 3000 BC is NOT evidence, its contemporary interpretation people in 2600 AD might do differently.