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According to the researchers’ calculations, Neanderthals likely could have heard voiceless consonants produced without the vocal cords. These included voiceless stops, such as “t” and “k”, and voiceless fricatives, including “f”, “s” and “th”. Voiceless consonants cannot be played aloud in a landscape – try shouting “ththth” or “sssss” – which could indicate that these consonants were used for close communication between members of the same species.
Even though Neanderthals had all the correct anatomy to support human speech, the authors admit that the physical ability of Neanderthals does not imply the mental capacity or cognition required for human language.
“Speech is not necessary for the language,” said Robert Berwick, a computer linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study. Dr. Berwick was not convinced of the authors’ interpretation of what the reconstructed ear says about Neanderthal communication; in his opinion, the favorable sweet spot for Neanderthal consonants does not imply an ability to acquire human language. “If we were to evolve with differently shaped ears, we would just use the contrasts that we are still able to perceive differently,” he said.
The question of Neanderthal speech may never be fully resolved, even as the evidence continues to accumulate. “There is no longer a Neanderthal to speak,” said Dr Goldfield.
Many recent discoveries about the nature of Neanderthal life present a compelling case that they behaved symbolically, wearing jewelry, making rock art, and burying their dead. These revelations helped emancipate Neanderthals from the long-held perception that early humans were primitive brutes, a myth partly rooted in racist ideology.
For a long time, scientists tended to think that there was a “leap” that separated modern humans from the rest of the biological world, such as cognition and language, according to Dr. Dediu. “But Neanderthals were probably as human as we are, but in a different way,” he said.
The most striking evidence of Neanderthal interiority can be found behind the Bruniquel cave in France, where archaeologists found two concentric rings of shattered stalagmites, traces of fire and burnt bones. The stalagmites had been broken 176,500 years ago – a time when Neanderthals were the only humans in the area.
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