With over 7,100 languages spoken across our planet, it can be hard to imagine a world in which written and spoken language didn’t exist.

We use it for everything: from ordering takeout to speaking to your doctor, to learning, growing, and falling in love, language is intrinsic to the way that we function as humans.

But according to a new study, for a huge chunk of the time that our species has roamed the Earth, we were without the use of the language capacity that is central to the way that we live our modern lives.

According to the study, which was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, it was only 135,000 years ago that our species evolved such that we were able to develop our now instinctive verbal language.

This means that over 100,000 years of our species happened without the capacity for the kind of language and conversation that many of us couldn’t imagine living without.

Developed and diversified as our ancestors split apart and explored new terrains and parts of our home planet, language was a skill that we honed over time after a mysterious moment in which psychologists believe language came to be.

However, the researchers argue in their paper, language capacity must have become innate in our species before the time when homo sapiens split into different groups to roam world, for a very key reason:

“The 7,000 or so languages in the world today share striking similarities in the ways in which they are constructed phonologically, syntactically, and semantically.

It follows that, if we can identify when the first division occurred, we can with reasonable certainty consider that date to define the lower boundary of when human language was present in the ancestral modern human population.”

Though, to the modern learner, our species’ languages can feel bafflingly different, linguists note that they follow such similar semantic patterns that they can only have developed, at the beginning, from a common tongue.

In their study, the team investigated genetic studies of indigenous Khoisan people, thought to be at the heart of our species at the time of division.

From their results, they conclude that the development of our species’ language capacity must have happened before the Khoisan people were divided from the rest of homo sapiens, a milestone that happened 135,000 years ago – though they note that at this point, language was really only in its infancy and our behavior still primitive.

It was merely the capacity for language that had become innate.

100,000 years later, humans were producing decorative items, wearing jewelry, and engaging in what we would now consider ‘modern behavior’, with the researchers arguing that language development was the key factor to the huge leap in our species’ progression.

With language, they argue, came the tools for human development.

And, given that development was similar across the world, our common capacity for language development, must be at the heart of that.

Thought that was fascinating? Here’s another story you might like: Why You’ll Never See A Great White Shark In An Aquarium