ON April 7, the US president opened his social media app and typed this about Iran and its 90 million people: "A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." A genocide threat, in plain English. Could that happen without human language? No. The language conveys an inhuman threat. Language is not the true problem in this situation. The language arises from the arrogance of power and the greed for oil. These dress up mass death in a casual social media post. Iran's own language was mature, subtle, and alive. Their replies trolled the U S posts. But it was with humanity. Humour and irony helped criticise US policies. Language is just a tool we made to talk to each other. What we do with it - that's what makes us human. Or not.

The Genetic Clue: 135,000 Years Ago

This inquiry leads us to a larger question. A question that science has been grappling with. When did humans start using language? The answers were inconsistent. Some archaeologists pointed to burial gifts. They consisted of engraved ochre, pierced shells, and burial gifts. This implied language was there 100,000 years ago. Others looked at fossil skulls and vocal anatomy and pushed the date way back. But a new study from March 2025 in Frontiers in Psychology tried something different. Instead of bones or beads, a team led by linguist Shigeru Miyagawa turned to published studies that used genomics to study population dispersal.

Here's their simple logic. Every human population alive today has language. And the roughly 7,000 languages spoken across the planet all share deep similarities in sound, grammar, and meaning. That strongly hints at a single common origin. If we can determine when the first human groups split, then language must have existed before that. Otherwise, we should observe at least one group today having no language or something fundamentally different. And we don't. 15 genetic studies from 2007 to 2023 that used data from whole genomes, or the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA were analysed. When they calculated median values from the non-maternal markers (Y chromosome and whole genome), the number kept coming out the same: around 135,000 years ago. That's the earliest clear split. So language capacity was already present by then, or earlier, but not likely later.

To put that in perspective, Homo sapiens as a distinct species shows up around 230,000 years ago in African fossils. That means for nearly 100,000 years of our existence, we had the biological hardware for language - but not yet the full communication system we would recognise. The genetic evidence gives us the latest possible date for language capacity: 135,000 years ago. But the archaeological record, which provides evidence for cultural symbols that are associated with language - engraved ochre, geometric eggshell patterns, and pierced shell beads - only becomes routine and widespread around 100,000 years ago. That's a gap of about 35,000 years. So what was happening in all that time?

The authors suggest that language could have started as a private cognitive system - a way of thinking, structuring thoughts internally - before it became externalised as a way to talk to other people. Once it became shared, they argue, it acted like a trigger. It accelerated and consolidated the symbolic behaviours we now recognise as fully modern human culture, such as art, social organisation, and complex communication methods. Language, they write, "had a direct and enormous impact on all facets of human life." They are not saying language suddenly came into existence fully formed 135,000 years ago. The genomic evidence allows us to estimate fairly reliably when the capacity for language must have developed.

Ability to speak

Now, language is one thing. Speech is another. Language is the cognitive system - combining words and syntax into infinite meaning. Speech is the physical act of making sounds that carry language from one person to another. For decades, a popular theory said human speech only became possible when the larynx dropped down the throat - an anatomical change supposedly unique to us, happening around 200,000 - 300,000 years ago. The "laryngeal descent theory" claimed that only modern humans could make the full range of vowel sounds needed for spoken language. That theory has since fallen apart. We now know male red deer and fallow deer also have a descended larynx - just like us. They retract it even further when roaring, so it sounds bigger and more intimidating. That is not speech; that's a size trick. A deeper voice makes a stag sound larger to rivals.

And over the last decade, research has shown that non-human primates - macaques, baboons, and chimpanzees - can produce clearly contrasting vowel sounds. They have the physical equipment for speech. They lack the cognitive capacity for language. One study recorded over 1,300 natural baboon calls and found they could make proto-vowel sounds acoustically equivalent to human vowels. Another study used X-ray video to model a macaque's vocal tract and concluded it could produce a wide range of intelligible vowel sounds. The ability to use contrasting vowels can be traced back at least to our last common ancestor with Old World monkeys like macaques and baboons. That ancestor lived roughly 25 to 30 million years ago.

Social Roots of Language

So what about the evolution of language itself - not just speech? The ability to form a large number of thoughts into spoken words is one of the things that separates us from other chimpanzees. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin imagined an early human ancestor using his voice like a male gibbon - musical modulation for courtship to compete with other males. He also thought language might have started by imitating predator sounds: growls, snarls and warning calls. Darwin called the evolution of language "pre-adaptation," which is now known as exaptation. Many evolutionary linguists argue that language was not a single, direct adaptation (a trait specifically honed by selection solely for speech) but rather a complex exaptation of existing neural and physical structures.

But to understand language fully - not just its vocal mechanics, but its very emergence as a system of meaning - you have to go beyond natural history. You have to step into the social world. As Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology, language is as old as consciousness, which only arises from the need, the necessity, of interaction with other people. Language is not just a biological inheritance. It's a social product—born from the pressure of human relationships. And it always carries within it the possibility of both domination and liberation.