they obviously had to communicate which things are edible, and doing so with grunting is frankly more impressive.

I can only imagine a bunch of people making REALLY theatric noises at each other and precisely wiggling their eyebrows to say "this leaf is edible but only when newly grown, when it's fully grown it'll make you legendarily constipated"

Not sure the second panel disproves the first. Tons of species that made primitive noises at each other survived that ice age.

I mean, in fairness, they were.

In fairness, we still are

Proto-agriculture was a thing

The Toba Catastrophe and LGM bottlenecks got them like 👀 though

We definitely won't do that to ourselves