Question: When and how was speech first invented?

Hannah Little answered on 23 Jun 2013:

Maybe “invented” is the wrong word here because nobody sat down and designed language, it emerged over a really long time. Guesses on when this might have happened actually range from anyway between 50,000-100,000 years to half a million years, which is quite a difference! No one really knows how speech evolved, but there are plenty of hypotheses, some people think that language was originally gestural and speech emerged so people could talk in the dak when they couldn’t see each other, or when they were using their hands to do other things. Others think that language has probably always been spoken and may have evolved from a musical protolanguage which our ancestors used to bond. I think language probably emerged because of the benefits of communication, though I don’t know if this would have been signed or spoken first.