TRENDING SCIENCE: Neanderthals could hear and communicate like Homo sapiens, say scientists

The debate over the linguistic capabilities of Neanderthals, our closest ancestors who went extinct about 40 000 years ago, has been raging for decades. New research seems to have provided some form of resolution as to whether they possessed a similar form of communication.According to findings published in the journal ‘Nature Ecology & Evolution’, our Neanderthal cousins could both hear and produce the speech sounds of modern humans. Research shows that Neanderthals had a similar capacity to modern humans to talk and hear. They could produce the sounds of human speech and had a hearing range necessary to process human speech.

“Neandertals could have produced all the sounds in that frequency range, like we can,” co-author Rolf M. Quam, associate professor at Binghamton University in New York, told ‘CNN’. “There does not seem to be any difference in their ability to produce speech sounds. So they definitely could have said ‘hello’ or ‘ok’ if those utterances had any meaning for them.”

An international team of researchers employed high-resolution CT scans to generate virtual 3D models of Neanderthals’ ear structures, including the canal, drum and bones. These models were then used to estimate the hearing abilities up to 5 kHz – the frequency range of modern human speech sounds. Results showed that Neanderthals and modern humans had similar bandwidths.“We don’t know if they had a language, but at least they had all the anatomical parts needed to have the kind of speech that we have,” explained lead author Mercedes Conde-Valverde from Spain’s University of Alcalá in ‘New Scientist’. “It’s not that they had the same language, not English, not Spanish, nothing like this. But if we could hear them, we would recognise that they were humans.”

“The results are solid and clearly show the Neandertals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech,” Prof. Quam noted in ‘Phys.org’. “This is one of the very few current, ongoing research lines relying on fossil evidence to study the evolution of language, a notoriously tricky subject in anthropology.”

The study also revealed another intriguing outcome. Neanderthals’ speech probably involved the use of more consonants. Until now, research into Neanderthal speech capacities concentrated on their ability to construct the main vowels in English spoken language.

“For decades, one of the central questions in human evolutionary studies has been whether the human form of communication, spoken language, was also present in any other species of human ancestor, especially the Neandertals,” added co-author Juan Luis Arsuaga, professor of palaeontology at the Complutense University of Madrid.

“These results are particularly gratifying,” stated co-author Ignacio Martínez, also from the University of Alcalá. “We believe, after more than a century of research into this question, that we have provided a conclusive answer to the question of Neandertal speech capacities.”