We do not know. Physicists John Wheeler believes that the existence of consciousness is so intimately linked with the expression of the state of a physical system, that universes without consciousness having evolved, are not possible because their 'wave functions' never collapse into a particular physical state. In a complex process, once a possible universe evolves conscious beings, this fact propagates back into time to the origin of that universe and transforms it into a real universe.
No one really understands what consciousness is in the first place, so it is hard to relate it back to the unfolding of physical mechanisms operating in the world. It might be the same as asking whether 'arms and legs' co evolved with the universe, or 'eyes' or some other attribute of the human condition. Consciousness is a very strange thing, no one as yet understands which brain functions bring it about, although we know that a particular location in our brain stem can turn it on and off like some kind of light!