How did language emerge as a means of communication?
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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
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