I remember in my literary theory class, one of the theorists made the (deliberately) absurd claim that writing preceded speech. Reading this, and I wonder if he was correct (as an aside, I tend to wander into the weeds in language articles on Wikipedia as I find myself increasingly curious about language evolution and I always wonder whether the different language families are “merely” a result of linguistic drift over millennia or whether human speech appeared independently in multiple points of origin).

Your instinctive reaction matches with scientific consensus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing

> Each historical invention of writing emerged from systems of proto-writing that used ideographic and mnemonic symbols but were not capable of fully recording spoken language. True writing, where the content of linguistic utterances can be accurately reconstructed by later readers, is a later development. As proto-writing is not capable of fully reflecting the grammar and lexicon used in languages, it is often only capable of encoding broad or imprecise information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_speech

> vocal languages must have begun diversifying at least 100,000 years ago

I have a theory that song used to communicate emotional states precedes and probably evolved into language as we think of it.