answer:Animals use language to a degree as well. They use it for protection, hunting and gathering, teaching their young, passing directions to others of their species, etc. Even creatures as small as ants communicate where food is, as do bees. Language has been developing over a very long time. Bacteria even communicate. Whether they made it to TED or not, anyone saying we evolved something because we needed it for X, Y or Z to develop is demonstrating a very profound misunderstanding of what Darwin meant by natural selection. Natural selection is not an elegant, parsimonious climb up a ladder to some premapped perfection. Natural selection moves forward, sideways and often even backward. It’s horrendously wasteful. 99.9% of all species that ever evolved have gone extinct. If evolution followed some cosmic master plan to serve each creature up just what it was going to need for the next stage of its road-map to perfection, we would find ourselves in a very different world from the one we inhabit. And it wouldn’t have taken us 4 billion years to get where we are today.