which came first, thinking or talking?

I've seen those trail camera things all over the internet.  The photos, wild animals poking around and maybe sometimes looking shocked when the flash goes off.  Good times.  They also have those Go something jimmies where you can strap them on you, like body cams I guess.  One guy somehow strapped one to his cat's head and he was able to see what his cat did all day long when it went outside, and the answer was not much.  Cats are great, but I have to admit that they don't do much.  People ask me how are my cats and I want to trot out some little story, and i think back and they slept and they ate and they went to the litter box and they slept and they crawled into my lap and then they jumped off and they slept, and maybe they batted the catnip mouse around a bit, and maybe they ran from room to room in the apartment like everything was on fire for a couple minutes before curling back into sleep.  It's hard to fill a Christmas letter with what the cats have done.

I read somewhere that when we first dropped down from the trees we were a favorite meal of the saber tooth tigers, just enough to quell those hunger pains, but not so much that you sleep all day, though they likely did that anyway, being cats.  So I mentioned this to Buddy and Sweetie, about their ancestors dining on my ancestors, and they looked mildly interested but a little puzzled.  They just didn't see how even a small hominid could fit into those itty bitty cans.  And who opened the damn things in those days anyway.  I used to think that when cats figured out how to open cans of cat food that would be the end of it for us humans, but then I realized that even if cats knew how to open cans they would prefer to have somebody else do the work.


So thinking you know, really hard to figure out how you could do that without a language?  Isn't thinking just talking to yourself?  Which came first?  Thinking, and we had to invent language to do that properly, or language because we didn't have much to think about until we had some words?  Some of those fancy pants linguists, including that new wave leftist Chomsky, believed that the thinking came first, that we had evolved some proto-language hard-wired into our brains just waiting to be given some words to speak with, the reason language pops up whenever you have a bunch of people together.

Is that worth chewing on?