Neanderthals have been in the news, unfairly dragged into our contemporary political dung throwing.
But every day seems to see another interesting study that suggests real Neanderthals were human but not quite like us.
One of the enduring questions is what Neanderthal speech was like, assuming they talked like we do.
Language is the quintessentimal human trait, pretty much the only feature that separates us from all the other animals. In general, all human babies learn at least one language, i.e., becomes competent enough to communicate with other humans.
Were Neanderthals fully human language users?
Neanderthals are anatomically human, and what we know of their behavior is certainly within the ballpark of contemporary humans. But their brains, skulls, and jaws were a little different, and they were genetically distinct. So, we don’t know for sure if they spoke like we do.
This winter researchers in Spain and elsewhere report a study of reconstructed Neanderthal ears [1]. Using CAT scans and computer modelling, they reconstructed the outer and inner ears of two Neanderthals and analyzed the audio properties of their ears. This work was compared to similar studies of earlier humans (ancestors to sapiens and neanderthal) and contemporary Homo sapiens.
They find that neanderthal physiology falls in between older and modern H. sapiens, but generally in the same range as contemporary humans. This indicates that the sampled individuals could hear the same range of sounds and we can, which is also the range used in speech.
In general, our oral communications has coevolved with our hearing, and speech communication is tightly tuned to human hearing. For that matter, in most species the audio communication coevolves with audio senses. So, the evidence from these Neanderthal ears is consistent with the possibility that they spoke like we do.
Now, there is room for healthy skepticism about anatomical determination of language. We know that anatomically whole individuals can lose or never develop speech, due to neurological or other issues.
And, most importantly, we don’t understand how humans learn language (or what “knowing a language” means physiologically), so it is impossible to know if Neanderthals had the right stuff or not. (Note that, strictly speaking, we can’t be 100% sure what language any humans spoke back then.)
However, this study seems to indicate that Neanderthals certainly could hear sapiens speech. So they probably could communicate with us somehow, through gestures and sounds, if not grammatical speech.
But, did Neanderthals speak language like us?
My own view, my Bayesian prior, is that they spoke very similarly to us.
First of all, Homo sapiens neandertalis was genetically and anatomically a sub-species of Homo sapiens. We also know that Neanderthals lived in complicated and long lasting social groups, and behaved in ways that are very similar to sapiens.
If all human babies learn language, and Neanderthals were human, then all Neanderthals learned language.
We can speculate more on this.
Neanderthals lived over a long period and wide area, so there likely were many Neanderthal dialects and languages, passed down through the generations. Neanderthals had close contacts with sapiens, to the point of interbreeding and raising hybrid children. This implies rich interpersonal communication, and, I would say, probably learning each other’s languages.
We know that we still carry Neanderthal genes. Perhaps our languages carry traces of Neanderthal speech.
Gosh, it would be cool to learn what they folks sounded like!
- Mercedes Conde-Valverde, Ignacio Martínez, Rolf M. Quam, Manuel Rosa, Alex D. Velez, Carlos Lorenzo, Pilar Jarabo, José María Bermúdez de Castro, Eudald Carbonell, and Juan Luis Arsuaga, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had similar auditory and speech capacities. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2021/03/01 2021. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01391-6
- Sabrina Imbler, Neanderthals Listened to the World Much Like Us, in New York Times. 2021: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/science/neanderthals-hearing-language.html
PS. Wouldn’t “Neanderthal ears” be a great name for a band?
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