How did language emerge as a means of communication?
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Grunting and pointing mainly. As there were more things to grunt about and new interactions between existing grunts and points, new grunts were devised. As the meaning of those grunts spread, more humans knew what those grunts and points meant and spread and developed more. Eventually the order of the grunts mattered too.
Probably starts with alarm calls. Vervet monkeys have different calls for leopards, snakes and eagles – and each results in different behaviour: for eagles, hide under a bush, for snakes, climb a tree, and for a leopard gather together. this obviously had an evolutionary advantage.
If you are foraging across a wide area and you come across a larger amount of food than you can eat yourself then being able to call “food” to near-by tribe members wins you kudos at no cost (and tribes that do this will survive better than tribes that don’t). But if you can signal “bit of food” or “lots of food” you let people further away know if it’s worth walking over or not. Being able to let people know you’ve found “water” or other useful but non food items such as flint is also useful. So you slowly build up a repertoire of nouns and modifiers such as “a lot” or “a little”.
Then you get imperatives, such as “come here” and “follow me”, together with names to identify individuals. Pretty soon (a few thousand years or so) you get to saying “You hide bush. I chase deer. You hit deer” And at that point you have a language
We have multiple ideas, but no concrete proof since the development of language occurred in pre-history as far as we know so we can only speculate,
Language came about with a mix of grunting/pointing evolving over time
AND the adaptability and spread of humans over multiple environments
if humans had stayed in Ethiopia/Eastern Africa, the need for language maybe wouldn’t have been realised so early as there would be a limited amount of flora/fauna/weather/tactics that would need to be explained, grunts and pointing could be enough
but once humans stated getting to Egypt/Europe/Asia/Russia then the wide variety of flora/fauna/weather needed many more grunts compared to staying in Ethiopia, (basically there were too few basic grunts, so *advanced* grunts were needed) – this is one of the many theories of language development
This human spread, coupled with various ‘tools’, advancement of proto-religions (as far as we can tell) and communities and bumping into new tribes, meant language would *need* to follow because of the sheer complexity of things that would exhaust all the basic grunting combinations, now *advanced* grunting (the beginnings of language) would be needed, and over time the advanced grunting becomes geographically specific language(s)
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