For a century and a half, the debate has been this:
Did the gods hand us language (aka biology), or did we build it ourselves?
In one corner, the nativist philosophers. Noam Chomsky argued we're born with built-in language machinery or so-called Universal Grammar, an instinct no child is really taught and no other animal has. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom went further and said language evolved, like any other trait, by natural selection. Language, in their telling, isn't an invention but an organ of the mind.
In the other corner, the toolmakers. Michael Tomasello and Daniel Everett argue there's no special grammar gadget in our biology. We're just wildly social apes with an unusual itch to cooperate, to guess what the other is thinking, to point at things together and name them. Everett calls language humanity's first great invention, refined like fire or the wheel. And Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater put it neatly: language is shaped by the brain and culture at the same time, evolving in our mouths as we go.
At one point, the discovery of a human gene looked like it might end the whole debate when FOXP2 got crowned "the language gene." Then it got complicated when FOXP2 also showed up in mice and songbirds. And later a 2018 study knocked down the idea that the gene could have some special, only-in-humans upgrade.
So who's right? Probably both camps. It's the least satisfying answer, and also the one that tends to be true. The current best guess is gene–culture coevolution. In other words, we evolved a knack for imitating, for sharing attention, for turning sound into symbol. That knack let us invent language, and the language we invented turned around and reshaped us too.
Which is a perfect origin story for storytelling itself. No one handed it to us finished. We found it, tested it, passed it around a fire, and improved it with every mouth it moved through. We're still doing it. Right now. You and me.