They had fire and stone tools and probably could talk.
Evidence of stone tools is clear with the Oldowan tools dating to 2.3 million years ago.
Human speech presents a much more difficult problem for anthropologists to research. The development of a speech functional supralaryngeal vocal tract arrives with Homo Sapiens. Communicating using speech is apparently a late development occuring sometime around 100,00 years ago.
See, for example, Strait et al, The Recent Origin of Human Speech; 2006.
Strait, et. al. Morphological Constraints on Hominin Speech Production; 2005
Alternatively, Steven Mithen has proposed Neanderthal vocalizing in his popularization, The Singing Neanderthals.
Of course proto-linguistic communication isn't talking per say, yet grunting and looking alarmed, for example, could be communicative, in olden days as well as in our own day.