New analysis suggests our language capacity existed at least 135,000 kya

I have just finished "Life and Adventures of William
Buckley", an English convict sent to Australia in 1802.
He escaped in 1803 and spent 30 years living with the
Aborigines. And then come across this article and
paper. It occurs to me that language was present when
they arrived in Australia. That's 50 to 65 kya
according to estimates I've seen. That strikes me
as a reliable minimum
https://news.mit.edu/2025/when-did-human-language-emerge-0314
It is a deep question, from deep in our history:
When did human language as we know it emerge? A
new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique
language capacity was present at least 135,000 years
ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social
use 100,000 years ago.
Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 230,000 years
old. Estimates of when language originated vary
widely, based on different forms of evidence, from
fossils to cultural artifacts. The authors of the new
analysis took a different approach. They reasoned that
since all human languages likely have a common
origin — as the researchers strongly think — the key
question is how far back in time regional groups began
spreading around the world.
“The logic is very simple,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, an
MIT professor and co-author of a new paper summarizing
the results. “Every population branching across the
globe has human language, and all languages are
related.” Based on what the genomics data indicate
about the geographic divergence of early human
populations, he adds, “I think we can say with a fair
amount of certainty that the first split occurred about
135,000 years ago, so human language capacity must have
been present by then, or before.”
...
The new paper examines 15 genetic studies of different
varieties, published over the past 18 years: Three used
data about the inherited Y chromosome, three examined
mitochondrial DNA, and nine were whole-genome studies.
All told, the data from these studies suggest an initial
regional branching of humans about 135,000 years ago.
That is, after the emergence of Homo sapiens, groups of
people subsequently moved apart geographically, and some
resulting genetic variations have developed, over time,
among the different regional subpopulations. The amount
of genetic variation shown in the studies allows
researchers to estimate the point in time at which Homo
sapiens was still one regionally undivided group.
...
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900/full
Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens
population 135 thousand years ago
Abstract
Recent genome-level studies on the divergence
of early Homo sapiens, based on single nucleotide
polymorphisms, suggest that the initial population
division within H. sapiens from the original stem
occurred approximately 135 thousand years ago.
Given that this and all subsequent divisions led
to populations with full linguistic capacity, it
is reasonable to assume that the potential for
language must have been present at the latest by
around 135 thousand years ago, before the first
division occurred. Had linguistic capacity
developed later, we would expect to find some
modern human populations without language, or with
some fundamentally different mode of communication.
Neither is the case. While current evidence does
not tell us exactly when language itself appeared,
the genomic studies do allow a fairly accurate
estimate of the time by which linguistic capacity
must have been present in the modern human lineage.
Based on the lower boundary of 135 thousand years
ago for language, we propose that language may
have triggered the widespread appearance of modern
human behavior approximately 100 thousand years ago.