Neanderthals were our closest human relatives and had many similarities to anatomically modern humans.
But he could Neanderthals am i talking Several lines of evidence suggest that they could. But to answer this question, it is first important to distinguish between speech and language.
The word refers to the ability to orally pronounce sounds and words. Language is much more complex; This means using these sounds to share ideas.
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Some research suggests this speech was acquired long before that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals once split in the evolutionary tree between 400,000 and 800,000 years.
“Before modern humans diverged from Neanderthals, the last common ancestor already possessed articulate speech,” Andrey Vishedskyneuroscientist at Boston University, told Live Science.
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence to support this theory is this H. sapiens and Neanderthals share two evolutionary mutations in a gene called FOXP2. This gene is involved in controlling the muscles in the mouth and face that help produce speech. Mutations in FOXP2 can cause language deficits in humans.
This suggests that Neanderthals were able to make the movements associated with speech, Wishedsky said. But what about the language?
By studying modern humans with language impairments, Vyshedskiy and colleagues suggest that humans evolved through three distinct language comprehension phenotypes. The most advanced phenotype that most people have is syntactic language. Syntactic language conveys complex narratives, uses possessive pronouns and includes verb tenses and spatial prepositions, he said.
Neanderthal DNA lives in us
A less complex language comprehension phenotype, called modifying language, involves understanding colors, sizes, and numbers. The least complex phenotype for understanding language involves only understanding commands, he said.
The command language comprehension phenotype probably developed earliest in our evolutionary history, soon after the human lineage diverged from the chimpanzee lineage six million years ago, he said. The modifier language gradually evolved 3 million years later, when people started making stone toolsfollowed by acquisition of a syntactic language only 70,000 years agohe said.
“So Neanderthals probably spoke like us, but had a modifying language phenotype,” he suggested. “Effectively, Neanderthals may have spoken like a 3-year-old child – well-articulated speech but no syntactic understanding of the language,” he said.
Some fossil studies also support the idea that Neanderthals had language. For example, in a 2021 study in the journal Natural ecology and evolution, researchers performed high-resolution computed tomography of the bones associated with hearing ability. They found that Neanderthals and modern humans had greater sensitivity to some sounds in the frequency range of spoken language than other primates.
“There appears to be convergence in hearing ability between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens and possibly also language ability,” Rolf Quam, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York and co-author of the study, told Live Science. As the maintenance of the sense organs is energetically expensive, most creatures do not develop sensory faculties that they do not use. So if Neanderthals had modern human hearing, the theory goes, they probably could have picked up modern human speech and therefore had some form of language, he said.
However, Quam admits there is some uncertainty about Neanderthal language abilities.
“Neanderthal language is one of the oldest questions in human evolutionary research,” he said.
For example, some studies of fossils – such as those that look at hyoid bone in the neck, which is involved in speech production — are inconclusive, he said.
Still, most experts would probably say Neanderthals had some linguistic ability, Quam said.
“At least you [Neanderthals] had a communication system that was much more complex than [that of] any living ape or primate species,” he said.
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