Human beings have been speaking languages for hundreds of thousands of years, but it is only recently that written language systems have been used.
The human species has existed for hundreds of thousands of years and for the overwhelmingly vast majority of that time, humans existed as hunter-gatherers. Life was nomadic. Time was likely seen as something that was cyclic, as opposed to being something with a beginning and an end.
This state of affairs changed around 15 000 years ago. Why this happened is a subject of great debate. For decades, the accepted theory was that it was done out of a need to look after crops as it was a more productive source of food. More recent discoveries, such as those at Göbekli Tepe, suggest that the move from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural society was done out of the desire to remain close to religious sites. And thus the sedentary living required the invention of agriculture.
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Yay! I get to be the Well Actually… guy.
Though as yet unproven, modern evidence has begun to point to the Harappan culture and language of the Indus valley to be older than Sumerian by quite a few centuries.
The language is as yet undeciphered, and there is debate between scholars on whether it’s a “language” proper, or just series’ of “pictographic representations.”
As a (former) Archaeology Major, I believe the former simply because what we know about the Indus Valley culture is that they were as complex and organised and advanced as the traditional “cradle of civilisation”; which shouldn’t be possible without advanced written language.
