Language may have begun to take shape during the Pleistocene,2 to 3 million years ago

Great apes gesture to each other in the wild much more freely than they vocalize.Language may have begun to take shape during the Pleistocene,2 to 3 million years ago, with the emergence of the genus Homo that eventually gave rise to our own species, homo sapiens.Brain size tripled, and bipedalism freed the hands for communication.There may have been a transition from gestural communication to gestural language from pointing to objects and pantomiming actions to more efficient, abstract signing.