If you were to able to travel back in time 50,000 years, abduct a paleolithic hunter from a river valley in southern France and haul him back to 21st century America, would he stand out in a crowd?
Depends on the crowd. He probably wouldn't blend in very well at the New York Stock Exchange. But dress him in shorts and flip-flops, hand him a backpack and he could probably stroll across any college campus in the country without attracting attention.
Human beings who lived 500 centuries ago were fully modern, virtually indistinguishable from us in fundamental ways. Their brains and bodies were physically the same as ours. They created sophisticated art - murals, paintings, sculptures - and buried their dead in a fashion that suggests they possessed ceremonial or religious traditions. They had developed the technology and navigational skills required to travel across broad expanses of ocean.
Eh. Kind of a dumb article trying desperately to come up with a global warming angle. How one can call the Younger Dryas a "minor fluctuation" is beyond me.