Agreed-- while many individuals in my own family have acquired language very early (and my DD and I are among them)-- her earliest memories are from 10-14mo, and mine from about that age as well. Now, I do know that she genuinely recalls those things, because they reflect incidents, times, and places that she has no context for otherwise (no photos, no family lore surrounding them, etc). They also reflect first-person experiences of sensory/emotional detail that other adults simply weren't aware of from a first-person standpoint.
Anything earlier than ca. 12mo, though, is just-- sensory detail in a way which is incredibly difficult to capture in words. It's not really narrative "memory" the way that most people think of it. I have some memory of objects from younger, and so does DD-- but it's too difficult to say whether or not that memory is something that was subject to later shaping/reinforcement as a toddler, since most of the objects in question were part of that stage in our lives, too. (So I recall the color of my bedroom, but I lived in that house until I was nearly three, so... and DD recalls her bedroom and one bathroom, but we didn't move from the house until she was almost 18mo).
I will also say that I had a number of narrative "memories" as a child which were impossible. Truly just impossible. But I was highly imaginative and had a great capacity for genuinely constructing sensory and emotional detail in my head. I wasn't alive at all for some of those events that I "remembered." I have no idea where this idea came from-- but I can still kind of retrieve the "memory" of it. I've wondered for years where it actually came from, and what it might genuinely represent. I think that it probably was inspired by some real series of events-- it's just that my framing is incorrect.
