No one can say when human animals first started to speak. The speaking apparatus – the cartilage of the larynx, the vocal cords and the tongue do not survive long after death; the shape of the skull of an ancient skeleton may reveal an expansion at the same place on the brain associated with speech in a modern human, but there are no fossil recordings of early speech. Did Neanderthals and Denisovans have language? All primates make noises to communicate, some use powerful calls to maintain their territories. So the structures which can give rise to voice had evolved long before there were hominids and humans: we have inherited them and adapted them further, not only to speak, but also to sing.

Our early ancestors needed to talk to each other for many reasons: to maintain relationships within the family group and tribe, to transmit information and the results of experience, to describe sources of food and of danger, and so on. But what came before actual language? They would have retained the primate ability to make a wide variety of sounds, from grunts to screams, and learned to combine them in a meaningful sequence so as to convey a message. Another form of communication is gesture – position and movement of arms, hands, head and body.

I can visualise my ancestors sitting around a fire and sharing their experiences using sounds and movement. Perhaps ‘Charades’ is one of the earliest games! Certainly I can imagine that song, in the form of combining simple melodies with regular beats using sticks and stones, was used to tell stories and inform the young. Language is complex because of the need to name objects, places, actions, wants and emotions and to put events in a time frame and therefore would have taken millennia to evolve. Perhaps song and theatre came first. What do you think?