Talk about a long silence 鈥� no one has heard their voices for 30,000 years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up 鈥� or at least a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf.
, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human鈥檚 speech lacked the 鈥渜uantal vowel鈥� sounds that underlie modern speech.
Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another, says McCarthy, who was talking at the annual meeting of the in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11.
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鈥淭hey would have spoken a bit differently. They wouldn鈥檛 have been able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken language,鈥� he says.
Talking heads
In the 1970s, linguist , of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, inferred the dimensions of the larynx of a Neanderthal based on its skull. His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.
Some researchers have criticised this finding, citing archaeological evidence of an oral culture and even errors in Lieberman鈥檚 original vocal tract reconstruction.
Undeterred, the linguist teamed with McCarthy to simulate Neanderthal speech based on new reconstructions of three Neanderthal vocal tracts. The 50,000-year old fossils all came from France.
By modelling the sounds the Neanderthal pipes would have made, McCarthy鈥檚 team engineered the sound of a Neanderthal saying 鈥淓鈥�. He plans to eventually simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence. Listen to McCarthy鈥檚 simulation of a Neanderthal voice
In contrast to a modern human 鈥淓鈥�, the Neanderthal version doesn鈥檛 have a quantal hallmark, which helps a listener distinguish the word 鈥渂eat鈥� from 鈥渂it,鈥� for instance. Listen to a simulation of a modern human voice
Though subtle, the linguistic difference would have limited Neanderthal speech, McCarthy says.
The language gene
That conclusion doesn鈥檛 fit in with Neanderthals鈥� large brains, which may have been an adaptation to language, says , an anthropologist at Washington University in St Louis. 鈥淯ltimately what is important is not the anatomy of the mouth but the neuronal control of it.鈥�
Neanderthals may have also boasted the genes for language, Trinkaus says. Last year, researchers discovered that Neanderthals shared a version of a gene called FOXP2 with humans.
People missing a copy of FOXP2 suffer from language and speech disorders, and humans have a version of the gene that is different from other animals 鈥� including chimpanzees, our nearest relatives.
Yet other genetic evidence suggests that spoken language shaped the recent evolution of humans. , a biological anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, also spoke at the Ohio meeting. He says that some genes important to hearing changed rapidly in modern humans, perhaps because the genes helped decode new, more complex spoken languages.
鈥淪omething鈥檚 changing in the last 40,000 years,鈥� he says. 鈥淢aybe this is because our ears are becoming tuned to listening to sounds that have recently been changing.鈥�
