That would be several species ago, and a creature perhaps not even of the same genus as Homo.
Almost certainly not the case; the development of a vocal apparatus capable of what we understand as verbal language is a pretty recent affair. No one knows (or can know) when exactly verbal language came about, but it is a relatively recent event and something that came about within a population fairly similar to ours, if not arguably defining our species.
I mention the apification of indigenous and/or early human peoples, because that's where this trope started; Victorian anthropologists using modern peoples they considered "primitive" as analogues for prehuman primate species and vice versa. While the conversation has changed, many of these ideas persist, and morevover, they always show up again eventually in this sort of conversation. You start talking about early man and chimpanzees, and all the old Imperialist language starts cropping up as though on order- "tribes" and "savages" and "close to nature" and "primitive features" and "non-hierarchical society" and all the other dogwhistles for outdated social and racial stereotyping both positive and negative. Whether as a compliment or an insult, it's always people of a certain lifeway that are getting compared to animals, never the privileged cultures. Even when social elites
are the target, the way to insult them is to refer to their "savage, tribal instincts", implying that they themselves are evolutionary throwbacks unworthy of the coveted title of the civilized. Falling short of civilized ideals. And in their case, it is
never a compliment. No one praises a CEO by calling her a "noble savage" or saying that she has "strong tribal instincts". Applied to a Eauroamerican, referencing the primeval to describe their behavior is taken as an inherent criticism. But all of this is pseudoscience and rhetoric. "Civilized" peoples and "uncivilized" peoples, however you choose to define those categories, bear the exact same degree and scale of biological relation to chimpanzees, and we are all
very distant cousins who took considerably different evolutionary paths. The anlogy fails no matter who you're trying to apply it to you, because chimp society is just different to ours, in very fundamental ways.
This junk needs to be expunged from our popular dialogue altogether. It is neither accurate nor salutory as an approach to real archaeology or paleoanthropology. As the Davids write in the introduction to the book, the myth of civilation magically appearing and transforming the "primitive world" by the power of agriculture is more like a virus or a meme than a serious theory - it isn't accurate, and it has dire political implications. Memes spread because they express something people desire to be true for emotional or sociological reasons, not because they've survived the gauntlet of scientific study.
Would I theorize about the social life of A. africanus based on a bunch of stoned twentieth century youths having sex? I think not.
While as I said, the Australopithecines aren't even in this conversation, I also feel that this a very solid answer to my question. Because we have a lot more in common with
A. africanus than we do with modern chimpanzees. Our common ancestor with
africanus cannot have lived than ~4 million years or so before the present. If
A. africanus is a bad analogue for the social structure of modern humans, chimpanzees and bonobos are laughably ridiculous candidates.