We are the only living ape with complex language, but why? What were the first words, and who spoke them? And did Neanderthals converse too?

No other species has our rich and adaptable language skills Mat Jacob/Tendance Floue

Who spoke the first words?

Language is a powerful piece of social technology. It conveys your thoughts as coded puffs of air or dozens of drawn symbols, to be decoded by someone else. It can move information about the past, present and future, formalise ideas, trigger action, persuade, cajole and deceive.

Today, there are 7102 such codes spoken around the world. All human societies have language, and no language is “better” than any other: all can communicate the full range of human experience. To those of us who study human evolution, this incredible universality suggests that our species has had language right from when Homo sapiens arose in Africa between 200,000 and 160,000 years ago. A more recent origin could not explain how groups that stayed in Africa after H. sapiens migrated to the rest of the world 60,000 years ago also have language.

If H. sapiens has always had language, could other extinct human species have had it too? Some believe that Neanderthals did – which would imply we both inherited it from our common ancestor some 500,000 or more years ago. This theory is consistent with the discovery that FOXP2, a gene that is essential to speech, is identical at two key positions in humans and Neanderthals but different in chimpanzees. But a single gene is not enough to explain language. And recent genetic evidence shows that the Neanderthal brain regulated its version of FOXP2 differently.

What’s more, language is inherently symbolic – sounds stand for words that stand for real objects and actions. But there is …