> Take humanity back perhaps 40k years ago and language did not even yet exist.

This is not quite accurate. The human lips, throat etc have evolved to be better at producing speech, which indicates that it's not that recent. And that it was a factor in the success of groups who could do it better than others.

It likely started "no later than 150,000 to 200,000 years ago."

sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_speech#Evolution_of_...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5525259/