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Surely language must have been present in *some form when our first sapiens ancestors wandered off from Africa into Eurasia?
Yup. But I don't see anybody reconstructing a 45K plus old proto-language.
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Must say, that it seems, quite certainly, an impossible task, jheem.
EDIT:
Is there anything like fossil evidence in language? Vestigeal remnants or the like..
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fossil evidence in language
Well, there's writing, but that's pretty recent. There's also loanwords, like the Germanic and Iranian lexical items in Finno-Ugric. Heard a Finnish professor deliver a paper on it once. Interesting. I'll try to find the handout. I've seen some alleged PIE loans into Archaic Chinese (or whatever it's called today): word for horse ma was one of them.
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Carpal Tunnel
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I found only a tantalizing hint, maahey:
About 40,000 years ago, with the appearance of the Cro-Magnon culture, tool kits started becoming markedly more sophisticated, using a wider variety of raw materials such as bone and antler, and containing new implements for making clothing, engraving and sculpting. Fine artwork, in the form of decorated tools, beads, ivory carvings of humans and animals, clay figurines, musical instruments, and spectacular cave paintings appeared over the next 20,000 years. (Leakey 1994)
Even within the last 100,000 years, the long-term trends towards smaller molars and decreased robustness can be discerned. The face, jaw and teeth of Mesolithic humans (about 10,000 years ago) are about 10% more robust than ours. http://talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/species.htmlIf they made tool kits, they surely talked about them! The comment about reconstructing the language made me try to find out about skeletal makeup: perhaps we are physiologically different enough from them that we could not make some of the sounds, even if we knew what they were?
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Yes, its is supposed that ancient africans-(bushmen,of the kalihari, it would seem from dna evidence) moved out of africa and populated the world.. but PIE seems to be much later!
this is based on certain words(like tree names, and animal names, and weather words) that suggest PIE or what ever you want to call the UR language was from a people who lived in a temperate (not tropical) climate.
bushmen have a very interesting language-- its the only surviving one with clicks (!) and whistle like noises.
interestingly, wild animals are spooked by human voices, but not by clicks or whistles (and many birds are not spooked by a bell round the neck of a cat!) there hasn't been enough time (or animals are not smart enough to recognize a pattern in a whistle/click noise but humans can and do! --so bushmen language is especially good in a hunter/gather environment.
its is speculated the the first languages made more use of these type noises. (aboriginal austrailians, surprizingly, are the closest genentic link to the bushmen... with almost no 'intervening' populations! because of changing water levels of the oceans, most of the 'path' of the first 'great migration' is now under water.
there was a 6 part PBS special about this (the genetic proof of migration, with just a comment or two along the way on languages!) last year, (there is a 'companion book')
exploring the migration of 'people (genetically with DNA markers) gives surprizing insite into 'language groups' too!
the centeral plains of asia extending into eastern europe seem to have been a great reservoir where population grew, and from there migrated to many other places, (south to india, where they displace the sparse population left over from the first great migration), west to europe (where they got isolated for a while) East to all of asia (in the meanwhile, older (first migration people) had moved into indoneasia, and were gettting ready to move to polyasia--
the last places 'explored' were the americas.. (and DNA/blood typing proves there were at least 2 major, seperate migrations. (languge groups support this too!)
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bushmen have a very interesting language-- its the only surviving one with clicks (!) and whistle like noises.
Not knowing what the proto-language was, I can't say for certain whether Khoisan languages preserve clicks or innovated them after the others left. We use clicks in English, just not as phonemes in words: e.g., kissing sound, gee-up, and the interjection transcribed as tsk-tsk.
The interesting thing about the Australian Aborigines is how they seem to have left little behind genetically while traveling to Oz. As I remember the PBS special, the South Indians are not that closely linked with them. Later arrivals?
There's a danger in equating "race", language, culture, and material artifacts that makes me nervous given the nature of the century in which I grew up. How much genewise did the Romans contribute to the Gaulish population? We know their impact linguistically. Then look at the Franks. They left loanwords, but French is still basically Neo-Latin. Or the Vandals in Northern Spain or the Lombards in Italy.
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geez, guys. didn't none of you read Clan of the Cave Bear? 
formerly known as etaoin...
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journeyman
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The Proto-World theory is the one that claims to be able to detect traces of the ur-language, from before our migrations out of Africa 50 or 100 000 years ago. So they (one proponent is called Donald(?) Ruhlen) think they can see TIK for finger/toe, MILK/MALK for milk/throat/suck/breast, in language families all over the world.
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Carpal Tunnel
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I once had the opportunity to listen to a couple speak a Guatemalan Indian dialect. The overall impression I had was that it sounded much like birds twittering. It was really quite fluid and beautiful.
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