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.
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