is that right language before character?no doubt?why is not character first?
What do you mean by “character”?
By “character”, do you mean something resembling an alphabet, or do you mean individual personality?
I assume the OP is talking about writing.
Speech came before writing because it’s more efficient; quicker and easier. To write you need a tool, a surface to write on, light to see by. You need none of these for speech.
Yes, even in Chinese and other character-based written languages, there were humans communicating with each other for tens of thousands of years, using sounds that became languages, before some humans thought to represent those sounds–or the meanings behind them–by drawing characters in clay or on wood or papyrus or paper.
We don’t know when humans first started using verbal language, but considering that chimps have various calls with various meanings, it’s likely that the roots of language go way back, especially if you are thinking of assigning a certain vocalization with a certain thing or action. Although we can’t know for sure, it is almost certain that “grunt” meant something specific before someone drew a picture of “grunt” to represent that thing.
With the rapid advance in gene sequencing, I would hope that we will know definitively in the next 10 years whether Neanderthals had what we’d recognize as a language. That would strongly imply that our common ancestor some 500k years ago had language, too. If I had to speculate, and that’s all we really have right now, I’d say that will find out that they did.
Speech goes back at least 100,000 and probably more like 200,000 years. Writing goes back maybe 10,000 years.