Who taught us?
According to the theory of evolution, it probably evolved together with homosapiens.
But a couple things that I think cast doubt on this theory -
1. It seems language in the sense of symbol manipulation to convey meaning has a (albeit fuzzy) Turing-Complete-alike threshold. You either have enough of it to emulate another, or you're left with simple commands. The argument is less-solid than Turing Completeness though, since Turing Complete machines are demonstrably very simple (and thus there's not much room for intermediate states), and "Human-Complete" systems seem to be very complicated, which gives ample room for "intermediate states" of language ability that is greater than simple straightforward commands and full fledged emulation capability (eg. "pretend to be batman teaching robin how to fight, what would you say?").
2. Feral child language abilities - apparently "feral children" don't learn language well. It could be due to various reasons (eg. malnutrition, psychological shock, lack of motivation, etc.) but together with #1 it gives credence to the idea that perhaps if language ability is somewhat binary, the relatively slow process of evolution shouldn't have given rise to full language capabilities and sub-human-complete language capabilities are probably not really as useful. Could language have followed another heritage (i.e. not from DNA), but from "gods"? (after all the legend of The Tower of Babel basically says gods interfered with our language)
That said, we could probably experiment with dolphins if we wanted to see whether language can spontaneously develop without a seed...
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