Neanderthal ear scans support idea they could hear us and had a type of human language
Lindsay Clark Tue 2 Mar 2021 // 13:15 UTC Share
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Computerised tomography scans and auditory bioengineering models of fossilised Neanderthals ears suggest our closest extinct cousins had a hearing range necessary to process human speech.
The virtual reconstructions based on previously published fossil specimens by researchers at the Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid, Spain and Binghampton University in New York, US, have shown that the occupied bandwidth of Neanderthal hearing was in the same range as that of modern-day humans, and also greater than that of earlier hominin samples recovered in Sima de los Huesos, the pit of bones in the Atapuerca Mountains, northern Spain.
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Mar. 2, 2021
To some it’s obvious that Neanderthals had language. To sustain and convey their cultural sophistication, they had to be able to speak, goes the argument. Now a new multidisciplinary approach, based on fossil evidence and modeling, claims to have categorically proven that they did.
Homo sapiens ancestors, for instance. Neanderthals manufactured glue from birch tar to firmly attach spearheads to shafts, and how would they teach that down the generations, by grunting? Some even argue that the roots of language may lie a million years in the past, well before
Homo sapiens began to evolve, based on similar arguments – cultural sophistication that would be challenging to pass down the generations without speaking.
For many decades, scientists have tried to answer whether other ancestors of modern humans possessed a similar form of communication, such as spoken language. They especially focused on Neanderthals, the closest ancestors of Homo sapiens that lived in Eurasia about 40,000 years ago. As a new study shows, these primates had almost the same hearing and communication abilities as modern humans. Research published in Nature, Ecology & Evolution.