Why Did Mankind Start Talking Anyway?

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I was thinking about this as I was making coffee just now (mostly because I've been 'preaching' to a few Christian-groups on Facebook that "mankind is just flocks-of-sheep in Our Father's pasture, so 'what we believe' doesn't change the course he sets for us to the slaughterhouse"). 'If we're just sheep,' I thought, 'why do we think our bleatings make a difference to our destinies?' Before we think about 'how God got in on it,' we are brought to the secular theory - the second one presented at the link - that spoken language had developed out of gesture language (langage d'action ... as it was suggested by the 18th-century philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac) and that both were inventions arising initially from the simple association between action and object. Then I think of of "Ma!" the first sound we make. We learn that if we make that sound loud enough for long enough, the 'milk-giver' will come and satisfy our little need. Failing that, "Da" or "Pa" will get us some help. It's not too much of a leap to imagine that 'someone' hears us when we cry out, "Abba!" But I fail to see how mankind's speech ever developed beyond the 'baby-cry'-procedure. Oh, we 'refine' our cries into "more-or-less exactly what we need to get/have-happen in order to quiet us," but it's still basically a sequence of 'something discomforts me, so I cry, so someone answers my cry (with words or actions), so I stop crying.'