Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Vulcans
3. What Does Quark Know Anyway?
In that episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where little, very orange men descend on Roswell during that famously infamous year of the 'weather balloon' (1947), Quark states, "The Ferengi will have warp drive technology centuries before hu-mons or Klingons or even the Vulcans". The history of Vulcan spaceflight is a bit muddled and fragmentary, contradicted in other places in the canon, but they (and the Klingons) definitely had warp drive a lot earlier than that!
It is possible that the Vulcans were a warp-capable species even before their Time of Awakening (our 4th century). We know they were capable of space travel at least by the 9th century BCE; the P'Jem monastery was founded on another planet in 850BCE (old Earth calendar, of course). After nearly destroying themselves in the 4th century, booting the gaggle of soon-to-be-Romulan Vulcans off the planet, and learning to chill out a bit, it apparently took the Vulcans about 1,500 years to rebuild their society and head back out into the galaxy.
The Vulcans definitely had warp-capable ships by the 20th century as one of them gave us Velcro in 1957, and they'd had run-ins with the Andorians before that. Something happened in the 21st century between humans and Vulcans that involved warp drive, I believe, and, by about the time Quark said the Vulcans should have achieved warp drive, they were already capable of warp seven, just as Earth had launched its first warp five.