You are saying that at first people communicated by means of "gestures" like yawning and scratching (even apes are more advanced that this!). Then the humans drew pictures of themselves yawning and scratching, and that (you tell us) is the origin of hieroglyphs. In all this time there
was no communication by speech!!
Speech commenced only when people started to
pronounce the hieroglyphs.
That is a very strange sequence of events.
At first, Stalin embraced a
crazy theory of the origin of languages proposed by a half-Scottish, half-Georgian linguist named
Nikolos Marr. This person has been described thus
Nicholas Marr is one of the 'lunatics' in Marina Yaguello's book Lunatic Lovers of Language. Other epithets levelled at him by fellow linguists include "madman" and "megalomaniac". Yet his theories were lauded in the Soviet Union between about 1930 and 1950.
After 1950, Stalin abandoned Marr's doctrines. Fortunately for Marr, he had already died, in 1934, so Stalin was unable to repress him physically.
I think your
gestures > "hieroglyphs" > speech hypothesis has something in common with Marr's ideas, or at least with the lunacy embodied in them.
He believed that the sounds of the languages arose via collective human activity and it was the socio-economic nature of the society that determined the language. Over the years he worked to discover the minimum number of semantic elements that formed the basis of all the world's languages and he finally got this number down to four. So, what he was saying was that all the words in all the languages of the world could ultimately be traced back to four 'words' or elements, namely sal, ber, yon and rosh.
Are these the sounds people made when, as you inform us, they:
then learned to pronounce the characters?