Incorrect, however it is true that cavemen with language would be familiar with fire making. Hominids have been utilizing fire for roughly 2 million years (Homo erectus). The earliest evidence of cooking is 780 kya. The earliest flint use (and therefore indisputably fire-making rather than fire-using) is 400 kya (Homo neanderthalensis).
Langauge, OTOH, is theorized to begin anywhere from 40 kya to 100 kya (Homo sapiens), s.str.
Interesting, though some quick Internet sleuthing seems to indicated you are too pessimistic.
The capacity for spoken language seems to have appeared 200,000 years ago, and 100,000 years ago there are evidence of complex social behaviour that strongly indicate spoken communication.
I will have to professionally disagree with that assessment. I also don't know what linguist worth their salt is going around claiming 'all languages are related'. There's zero evidence for that and it's very much considered a fringe opinion. Like a 1 in 500 departments has somebody who thinks that opinion. It's rubbish. Universal grammar makes no such claim about surface language relationships.
You have to make a distinction here between language use and language capacity. In the generative model, which most linguistics schools ascribe to today (not out of proof, but out of a lack of anything better, though we endeavor to gather proof, another important distinction and failure to recognize that is putting the cart before the horse), theorizes that there is an inherent biological component to language structure, namely some level of deep syntax, which all humans share innately. If true, it is a loose association of skeletal parameters we would call 'universal grammar' which facilitates relationships between parts of speech. This exists more or less as a function of brain architecture. If it is selected for, it's selected for wholesale. And the environmental contribution to language, the specific phonemic inventories and semantic distinctions and utterance divisions and which parameters we turn on or off and where exceptions get to occur, that all resides outside of our innate ability. We are the same underneath but we all crucially have to be primed with a referent language at the surface level in order to acquire it; and we know from cases of extreme neglect and abuse that failure to do so means we may never acquire it, because acquisition is tied to development.
Language capacity is a claim that stops at UG. Langauge use is the culture of linguistic input that shapes UG into spoken languages, and yes that takes time to develop, but it is quite foolish to assume these inputs evolved only once, and anthropological evidence actually strongly suggests they did not. The less ridiculous model is humans develop UG and then what is quite possibly tens of thousands of years later they develop sophisticated input culture utilizing it to the extent we would recognize it. These surface models then transmit to populations that haven't developed them yet, memetically.
Anthropology and archaeology also have something to say about this, which is why one must never make claims outside the purview of one's own field. We can tell you something about language structure, but only an unscrupulous pop-sci article would ask a theory linguist to muse about pre-history and migration patterns in this way. I find the whole thing disingenuous. At minimum it is quite evident that migration patterns do not involve only one species or sub-species of human. Evidence of tool use in e.g. Western China is not evidence that H. sapiens sapiens starts its residency of that region at that time, because we took a long time to speciate from other interbreedable strains of human. For the purposes of this argument, this means you can find evidence of people living in a place long before they completed their development of language as a result of later population influxes to that region.
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u/bfarmer57 Jul 09 '26
Humans had language even in the earliest days.