How long did the first language take to evolve in humans?

Languages are fascinating. Essentially, these are just sounds we make with our mouths (of course!). However, the effects of these sounds are just magical. 

Writing is said to be revolutionary, a pathbreaking event in our evolution as a communicating species. However, I think formation of a language, especially the first languages, must have taken a long, long, time. How much? We have no idea, none at all!

Precisely because writing leaves at least some residue, a clay tablet here, a rock scribble there, so it is easy to date a script and chart its evolution from squiggly symbols to defined characters with meaning. But what about words? Without the accompanying script to light the way, we have no way to trace how certain words were formed, how things were named, and also, most importantly, how the early languages survive, if at all, in the modern, extant languages.

A recent book is on my radar - "Proto" by Laura Spinney (affiliate link). It tells the story of one of the mother languages of the earlier times, Proto Indo-European (PIE), that later gave birth to so many of the most widely spoken languages of today. I have been fascinated with this language for some time, after reading about it in the wonderful book "India Discovered" by John Keay (affiliate link). It tells the story of Sir William Jones, a Welsh scholar and judge, who founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784. 

 

 

Jones was fascinated with Indian culture. Quoting from Wikipedia, 

"He studied the Vedas with Rāmalocana, a pandit teaching at the Hindu University of Nadiya, becoming a proficient Sanskritist. Jones kept up a ten-year correspondence on the topic of jyotisa or Hindu astronomy with fellow orientalist Samuel Davis. He learnt the ancient concept of Hindu Laws from Pandits.

In his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society (1786) he suggested that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin languages had a common root, and that indeed they might all be further related, in turn, to Gothic and the Celtic languages, as well as to Persian. Although his name is closely associated with this observation, he was not the first to make it."

Here is a screenshot from a video explaining how Jones discovered, or hypothesized, PIE. 

 

The video is located here, and it is quite an interesting one. Here is another useful screenshot from the video, showing the similarity between Latin, Greek, Gothic, and Sanskrit. The discovery must have been a "Eureka" moment for Jones.

 

However, I digress. PIE or its sister languages, would still be quite the latecomers. I am thinking of a time several decades or hundreds of years before PIE had the time to develop.

How did the first humans come together as groups? How did they then develop sounds to represent words? How did they then make sure that these sounds were somehow preserved across generations in the absence of any written records?

We may never find the answers to these questions. But, we never know what the future holds for us. Maybe we will have a technology to analyze our past using a different technique that may shed light on this fascinating part of our history.