What happened 5000 years ago?

If home sapiens has been on earth for 100,000 years, why did God sit idly by for  95,000 years before getting involved asks Christopher Hitchens.  Was he napping for 98% of human history?

Dinesh D'Souza answers

The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born before Christ came to earth.

"So in a sense," Kreps notes, "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population, so even though 98 percent of humanity's timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption."

With an argument that boomerangs, D'Souza continues

Homo sapiens has been on the planet for 100,000 years, but apparently for 95,000 of those years he accomplished virtually nothing. Besides some cave paintings, no real art, no writing, no inventions, no culture, no civilization.  Both the wheel and Egyptian hieroglyphics are only 5000 years old.

How is this possible? Were our ancestors, otherwise physically and mentally undistinguishable from us, such blithering idiots that they couldn't figure out anything other than the arts of primitive warfare?

So how did Homo sapiens, heretofore such a slacker, suddenly get so smart? Scholars have made strenuous efforts to account for this, but no one has offered a persuasive account.
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Well, there is one obvious way to account for this historical miracle. It seems as if some transcendent being reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit or soul into man, because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software.

He really captured my attention.