We are profoundly ignorant about the origins of language, and have to content ourselves with more or less plausible speculations. We do not even know for certain when language arose, but it seems likely that it goes back on the earliest history of man, perhaps over a million years. We have no direct evidence, but it seems probable that speech arose at the same time as tool making and the earliest forms of specifically human co-operation. In the great Ice age of the Pleistocene period, our earliest human ancestors established the Old Stone Age culture: they made flint tools, and later tools of bone, ivory and antler; they made fire and cooked their food.