Burials with grave goods are reliable proof of symbolic thought. Beads are reliable proof.
Denisovans used rotary drills 70,000 years ago.
Nothing about H. sap. was different 200kya except culture. Physical remains are so thin, and so little even looked for, that lack of it anywhere tells you practically nothing.
Ok but this does not match what you said above. There is a long timeline here and interbreeding is a factor. Denisovans are certainly possibly just small H sapiens but H erectus did not exist 200 kya and Neandertals had a substantially different brain case. My guess is if they got language they got it via interbreeding with H sapiens.
The lack of evidence does create a lot of space for suggesting pretty much anything.
What evidence is this based on? This is fantasy, particularly 200kya.
> neanderthals, denisovans, and H. erectus … were by all measures humans
This is untrue. We have no evidence that any of them used language or even symbolic thought.