Birds use songs and calls, and other animals use a combination of sounds and movements to communicate.
Animals may not be able to form words, but they can certainly communicate. Birds use songs and calls, and other animals use a combination of sounds and movements to communicate. Primates have an advanced system of communication that includes vocalization, hand gestures and body language. But even primates stop short of what man has been able to achieve -- spoken language. Our ability to form a limitless number of thoughts into spoken word is one of the things that separates us from our less evolved cousins. While we know that language first appeared among Homo sapiens somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago, the secret to how language evolved is still unknown, and mainstream theories fall into two distinctly different camps.