Being able to communicate complex concepts made it easier for them to work together. Once the hominids became apex predators, their main adversaries were other hominids. Again, in that case, the better you can communicate, the better your chances for survival are.
These bits of grammar don’t always actually communicate any extra information about anything other than the grammar of the language you’re speaking, though. The “gender” of the thing in question can’t reliably be distinguished from grammar since even in the Indo-European languages where the noun classes are typically thought of as masculine or feminine, the word’s grammatical gender can contradict its actual gender. The Old English word for “woman”, back when English had grammatical gender, was masculine.
Being able to communicate complex concepts made it easier for them to work together. Once the hominids became apex predators, their main adversaries were other hominids. Again, in that case, the better you can communicate, the better your chances for survival are.
These bits of grammar don’t always actually communicate any extra information about anything other than the grammar of the language you’re speaking, though. The “gender” of the thing in question can’t reliably be distinguished from grammar since even in the Indo-European languages where the noun classes are typically thought of as masculine or feminine, the word’s grammatical gender can contradict its actual gender. The Old English word for “woman”, back when English had grammatical gender, was masculine.
So is “das Mädchen” in German, it is a young female but it’s neutrally gendered.