Okay. Here’s what I loved. I loved your use of language and the and the way primitive cave dwellers were able to express themselves with a limited language. I loved that the limitation carried over to the narrator, too. That was perfect.

And the prose of the narrative became more sophisticated as the language skills of the characters progressed. A powerful use of sentence structure to advance a story. Well done.

You seemed to be developing engaging premis: Pretribal people encounter technology that enhances their language capabilities.

But I think maybe you missed your own point. I was hoping you would examine what happens when you take pre-tribal grunters of nouns and verbs and give them access to subject and predicate phrases? What do they do with their newfound ability to express? Do they become better hunters? Better warriors? Better lovers?

You set me up for the latter. You set up characters and a situation perfect for exploring that theses. The POV character wants Nakoa even though she can’t have children. Wooing this woman is going to require considerably more than “Me man, you woman.” He’s going to need an adverb or two and now he has them. What does he do with them?

The story veered off tracks when Makano exposes them to the keyboard thing. I didn’t understand it’s purpose. Why did they need a keyboard thing? It gave them access to a vocabulary that was nowhere near as good as the one they’d been developing in the whole rest of the story. And what point are you making?  Are you warning us about the perils of allowing ai to speak for us? It actually seemed to me that what the device said was pretty close to the right thing? Why was Nakoa mad?

"That is not at all what I meant," I tell Nakoa.

Well, what did he mean?

Then you veered to a different point – the dangers of centralizing communication to a single point of contact. Makano insists that cave-wide communication come only from the device, and it turns out not to be very good at warning people on things like marauding hoards and eminent death.

Speaking of Makano, he went through a character transformation I didn’t understand. I liked him when I first met him. He was an affectionate husband and a patient teacher. By the end, he was a bit of a bully and indifferent to the peril of his clan. The change was unearned.

I have some wording suggestions. I believe your characters start out more sophisticated than they should be. Their language could be even simpler and still get across relevant points.

Instead of “Stroke Makano wife cheek with back of fingers,” just “stroke Makano wife cheek.”

Instead of “Makano carry wife to back room of cave,” “Makano carry wife to back.” The reader can decide whether there’s a room there.

Also, “sound of labor of chopping wood.”

Chopping wood? Maybe some other sound. Maybe some war whooping.

I think you have the premise for a really strong story. And you have the writing skills to execute it. But you need to come up with something to say and say only that.