Please show any proof of speech prior to 6000? That proof is not possible because no writings existed is a myth.
The converse to what bluegenes said, however, *is* useful to us. In other words, evidence of written language does show that people were talking well before that. We have examples of writing earlier than 4004 BCE. One is the Jiahu script, at 6,600 BCE (nearly 9,000 years ago), and another is the Tartaria script, from the 5th millennium BCE (about 7,000 years ago). There are others as well. While it is debated how sophisticated these are as, say, alphabets, it really doesn’t matter for our discussion here, since even proto-writing shows that language is in use and probably has been in use for a long time.
™ Version 4.2
