According to the Old Testament, language was a gift to Adam and was for a time the common language of all humans.
According to the Old Testament, language was a gift to Adam and was for a time the common language of all humans. When people built the Tower of Babel so that they might reach closer to Heaven, the Lord thought them disrespectful and dispersed them, and confounded their languages so they could no longer communicate. Echoing this story Noam Chomsky has argued that language was bestowed on some individual, whom he whimsically names Prometheus, within the past 100000 years, well after Homo sapie ns