Have You Ever Thought about the Genesis of Language?

As English Language Day (April 23) draws near, I found myself reminiscing about the origin of this human-specific gift of pairing sounds with symbols to establish communication channels. Humans are the only species that can combine grammar and lexicon and who are able to encode and decode sequences of sounds that are semantically meaningful.
However, the question remains: What is the origin of language? Theologians and religious scholars–especially in the Islamic faith–affirm that lingual competency was bestowed upon Adam by God.
Adam was created as a learning being who could acquire knowledge rapidly. This distinctive feature gave him a status higher than that of other creatures—even angels–because with the abundance of knowledge came free will. In the Quran (Surat Al Baqarah), the angels failed the test of knowledge while Adam was able to name everything and every other creature from memory.
What matters here is that this kind of holistic knowledge was conferred upon Adam via one (and only one) medium: language. Hence, linguistic abilities are part and parcel of being human given that they go hand in hand with the physical creation of the first human. Now, this sounds like a plausible explanation for believers, but what about skeptics?
Most Darwinism-imbued scientists, thinkers and researchers follow a much more complex path in establishing the inception of language. Philosopher and thinker Noam Chomsky–often called “the father of modern linguistics”–theorizes that children are born with an innate ability to learn language and need only minimal exposure to language as stimuli in order for language development to emerge. Chomsky asserts that the ability to use language is the sole feature that has developed exclusively in humans since their evolution from apes.
Other researchers believe that infants are born with a tabula rasa—a “blank slate,” if you will–and that they subsequently acquire language through human interaction and communicative exchanges. Still, the question is pending: What is the origin of language, and what is the exact point in time where it came to exist?
Well, these very same researchers attempted to trace back in time the emergence of language by delving into disciplines such as paleontology. Chomsky, for instance, studied fossils of Neanderthals, an extinct ancestor of homo sapiens (in particular their vocal cavity), and concluded that their linguistic faculty could neither be asserted nor refuted.
This opened the door for speculation and ensuing research on primates in the hopes of uncovering empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that the animal sound-gesture system is the predecessor of current human communication.
However, most experts in theoretical psycholinguistics rejected such claims as unsubstantiated and oversimplified, primarily because of their embrace of Descartes’ theory of rationalism and its application to language development: Humans created language through a successive process in order to serve their psychological need to communicate with one another. Chomsky, for instance, asserts that humans possess higher cognitive processing skills than do animals, and boast a brain with “computational,” or data-processing characteristics.
So, are we back to square one when we said that humans have an elevated status because of this gift? Are we simply changing scriptural terminology with modern, fancy scientific terms?
In short, unraveling the origin of language remains utterly speculative due to the dearth of pertinent empirical data. Revealing answers as to its evolution will undoubtedly invite more scrutiny and testable hypotheses, and will clearly necessitate interprofessional collaboration (i.e., a theological-scientific dyad) in order to arrive at some definitive conclusions.