How did humans come up with words for things? Do we know when people started talking to each other? Do we know the first language that was made?
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If you’re looking for an interesting rabbit hole, look up proto-indo-european. It might as well be the most recent common ancestor for the most languages. How it evolved is well studied, even if we don’t know everything yet.
This occurred deep in pre-history, long before we were writing things down and possibly before we were “human” as you know it today.
Our vocalizing is certainly the most complex “language” you’ll find in the animal kingdom but it’s not entirely unique either. Other animals do use sounds to communicate ideas and information between individuals.
This can be pretty basic territorial and alarm grunting from cows, or it can be very sophisticated communication between parrots who have unique “names” for eachother and different locations and objects.
That’s why you can teach some species of parrots to mimic human speech, they have very complex sound processing and reproduction capabilities to communicate amongst themselves.
So the answer to your question is that we’ve likely always had it, evolving monkey grunts into increasingly complex language and the brain and mouth parts required to do it over a very long time. Humans never existed without language.
> How did humans come up with words for things?
Nobody really knows. It’s possible human ancestors had a more rudimentary form of communication that had some simple sounds and word like things that were assigned to specific things, and that developed into a basic language, and then that was further developed into a more complex language.
> Do we know when people started talking to each other?
Not really, no. Unfortunately languages don’t leave a fossil record in the same way that big brains do. Basically it’s commonly accepted that it was definitely before ~50k-75k years ago, since that’s when the first evidence of ‘behaviorally modern’ humans appears in the archeological record.
> Do we know the first language that was made?
Once again, no, not really. Historical linguistics is actually a pretty big field, and we’ve been able to trace several language families back thousands of years, but after enough time has passed, languages become different enough that it’s impossible to reliably find similarities between them.
The most famous language family, and arguably the most well reconstructed, is the Indo-European language family, which includes English, Latin, Greek, Persian languages, and northern Indian languages. Nearly half the people on the planet speak an Indo-European language. This language family descends from a single language known as Proto-Indo-European, which was spoken some 5-6 thousand years ago in the Eurasian Steppes before spreading to Europe and the Indian subcontinent. This language has been reconstructed by linguists, so we know roughly what it sounded like.
However, Proto-Indo-European is not even the oldest known language family. Proto-Afroasiatic (from which many languages in the near east and north Africa are descended from), is estimated to have been spoken around ~15k years ago.
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