It is a deep question, from deep in our history: when did human language as we know it emerge? A new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.
Chimps, too. I couldn’t find the article to link here, but I remember seeing somewhere that they have discrete howls that can be combined for subtler meaning; not too far from having a howl for “leopard”, another for “close”, and then using both to say “there’s a leopard nearby”.
The key difference between chimps, corvids and dolphis vs. humans is that humans developed that system to the point it eclipsed non-verbal communication (although we still use it a fair bit).