The ability to produce and comprehend spoken language is a key defining feature of the human species. The evolutionary roots of language (how old is language? where did it come from?) are, however, less clear. One powerful way to begin to answer this question is to investigate the communicative abilities of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee, with whom we shared a common ancestor around 6 million years ago. This talk reviews some of the research conducted over the last decade investigating the presence of key features of language (semantics, syntax) in the communication system of chimpanzees. Together these results are beginning to suggest that the cognitive building blocks underlying human language might be much older than we thought and likely evolved prior to the emergence of language itself.