No one knows for how long humans have been talking, but it probably hasn’t been a really long time. The Khoisan are the oldest living humans, with a genetic line going back 53,000 years.
Their languages are very odd and in a sense, primitive, in that they consists of a lot of clicking-type sounds called clicks. It seems clear to me that this is the remains of the first language. The first language was not the typical vowels and consonants of non-click languages, which tend to form more discreet and often sonorous sounds (though consonants do have a “clickiness” about them, I will confess), but was instead, a large inventory of a variety of clicks.
Later the Khoisan added more typical vowels and consonants to their phonemic inventory, possibly due to influences of the non-click languages around them or possibly even innovated de novo the same way that non-click languages must have innovated their non-click sounds. So human language may go back a good 53,000 years if the Khoisan have had language as long as they have existed.
If language was present 53,000 YBP, when did it show up first? One clue we might look at is rock art. When rock art first appears, this may be a clue that these humans had language. How can we posit this? First we need to understand what art, even rock art, is. Art can be defined as the external representation of thought. And what is language? Language is many things, but it identical to art in that both art and language represent the external representation of thought, hence when art first shows up in human history, language may already be there or at least is not far behind.
