The other question is whether we’dallow another species to master language. I’ve never considered this question before, but my guess is that we would.
At this point, we’d encourage it. (See people trying to communicate with dolphins, or dogs, or gorillas, or parrots, or...)
But the relevant time period was probably when there were multiple species in the homo genus; as most similar to humans, they were probably also the fewest steps away from language and also the most likely to be a competitor for the same ecological niche. There’s much more reward to anatomically modern humans for driving neanderthals to extinction than driving parrots to extinction, and so we don’t see our near competitors in the race to language anymore.
At this point, we’d encourage it. (See people trying to communicate with dolphins, or dogs, or gorillas, or parrots, or...)
But the relevant time period was probably when there were multiple species in the homo genus; as most similar to humans, they were probably also the fewest steps away from language and also the most likely to be a competitor for the same ecological niche. There’s much more reward to anatomically modern humans for driving neanderthals to extinction than driving parrots to extinction, and so we don’t see our near competitors in the race to language anymore.