A new study has found that our Neanderthal cousins have the ability to hear and elicit the sounds of modern day speech.
Based on a detailed study and digital reconstruction of the structure of the skull bones, the study settles one part of a decades-long debate about the linguistic abilities of Neanderthals.
“This is one of the most important studies I’ve been involved in during my career,” said palaeoanthropologist Rolf Quam of Binghamton University.
“The results are solid and clearly show that the Neanderthals had the ability to sense and produce human language. This is one of the few conventional lines of research that relies on fossil evidence to study linguistic evolution, a very difficult subject in anthropology. “
The idea that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalis) they were much more primitive than modern people (Homo sapiens) are old-fashioned, and in recent years a growing body of evidence has shown that they were far more sensible than we once assumed. They developed technology, crafted tools, created art and held funerals for their dead.
But whether they talked to each other, however, remains a mystery. Their complex behaviors seem to indicate that they needed to be able to communicate, but some scientists have said that modern humans have only had the capacity for complex linguistic processes. -fold.
Whether that is going to be very difficult to determine one way or another, but the first step is to determine if Neanderthals could produce and detect sounds in the field. best for speech-based communication.
3D model of modern human anatomy (left) and Neanderthal (right). (Mercedes Conde-Valverde)
So, using a handful of very old bones, this was what a team led by palaeoanthropologist Mercedes Conde-Valverde from the University of Alcalá in Spain aimed to do.
They performed high-resolution CT scans of the skull of five Neanderthals to create meaningful 3D models of the ear structures. They also shaped the ear structures inwards Homo sapiens, and a much older fossil – the hominin skull of Sima de los Huesos, also known as the Sima hominin, ancestor of Neanderthals, dating back to about 430,000 years.
A model of the hearing capacity of these structures from the field of audio biomechanics was then used to understand the frequency range to which the ears were most sensitive, also known as the bandwidth. For modern people, residential bandwidth is the realm of human voice.
The team found that Neanderthals had better hearing in the 4 to 5 kilohertz range than Sima’s ancestor, and that the Neanderthal property bandwidth was closer to that of modern humans than the homa Sima. This optimization strongly suggests that Neanderthals needed to hear each other’s voices.
The residential bandwidth of modern humans (blue), Neanderthals (gray) and the Sima hominin (red). (Conde-Valverde et al., Nat. Ecol. Evol., 2021)
“This is the key indeed,” Conde-Valverde said. “The presence of similar hearing aids, especially bandwidth, demonstrates that the Neanderthals had a communication system that was as complex and efficient as modern human speech.”
Interestingly, the bandwidth of Neanderthals property expanded to frequencies above 3 kilohertz which is heavily involved in conifer production. This, the team noted, would differentiate Neanderthal calls from the sounds based on vowels of non-human primates and other mammals.
“Most previous studies of Neanderthal speech abilities focused on their ability to produce the main vowels in the spoken English language,” Quam said.
“However, we feel that this emphasis has gone wrong, as the use of consonants is a way of bringing more information into the vocal signal and it also separates human speech and language from the patterns of communication in almost every other prime minister. above all this is an interesting part of the research and is a new suggestion of the language abilities of our fossil ancestors. “
The fact that the anatomy is capable of producing and hearing speech does not mean that Neanderthals had the mental capacity to do so, the researchers cautioned. However, they point out, we have no evidence that the Sima hominins exhibited the complex symbolic behaviors, such as funerals and art, that we found associated with Neanderthals.
This difference in behavior is paralleled by the difference in hearing ability between Neanderthals and Sima hominins, which, the researchers say, suggest a reversal of complex behavior and the ability to communicate orally.
“Our findings,” they wrote in their paper, “together with recent findings revealing symbolic behavior in Neanderthals, reinforce the idea that they had a kind of human language, one that was very different. differs in complexity and efficiency from any other oral communication system. used by non-human organisms on the planet. “
The research was published in Ecology of Nature & evolution.