three-quarters of a million years ago

In the current issue of Science, Nira Alperson-Afil, Gonen Sharon, Mordechai Kislev, Yoel Melamed, Irit Zohar, Shosh Ashkenazi, Rivka Rabinovich, Rebecca Biton, Ella Werker, Gideon Hartman, Craig Feibel, and Naama Goren-Inbar present archeological evidence for the "Spatial Organization of Hominin Activities" about 750,000 years ago. Which means that civilization, of sorts, is very old indeed. No word yet on whether the research team found any evidence of a pleistocene Starbucks.

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