Did Our Ancestors Speak?

Short of going back in time and listening to them, I would have to say it is next to impossible to know for certain whether Homo antecessor or Homo heidelbergensis could speak like modern humans do, but a new study, as discussed in Discovery News today, does suggest that our evolutionary ancestors could probably hear sounds in the same range as we talk and hear language.  I think it is reasonable to assume that as hominids evolved and their brain sizes increased they would develop more and more complex forms of communication.  All life has ways of communicating, even as simple as slight genetic mutations passed from one generation of bacteria to the next, the question I would like to ask is “when did hominids begin to think abstractly about their surroundings and thus use their communication symbolically to represent ideas?”  While the study above certainly shows that our ancestors may have been able to hear speaking this does not necessitate that they actually did speak.  Still it is an interesting find, and personally I don’t believe it is too unreasonable to believe that speech may be much older than just Homo sapiens.