When he defied the ice-age by the use of fire, when he outfaced and outlived the mammoth and the cave bear, he was already the rational animal, _homo sapiens_.

In his way he thought, even in those far-off days.

And therefore we may assume, until direct evidence is forthcoming to the contrary, that he likewise had language of an articulate kind.

He tried to make a speech, we may almost say, as soon as he had learned to stand up on his hind legs.
Unfortunately, we entirely lack the means of carrying back the history of human speech to its first beginnings.

In the latter half of the last century, whilst the ferment of Darwinism was freshly seething, all sorts of speculations were rife concerning the origin of language.
One school sought the source of the earliest words in imitative sounds of the type of bow-wow; another in interjectional expressions of the type of tut-tut.