Neanderthals are speaking up - or at least a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf.

"They would have spoken a bit differently. They wouldn't have been
able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken
language," Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic
University in Boca Raton says. Neanderthals would not distinguish
between "beat" and "bit", but probably would not notice.



Neanderthals speak out after 30,000 years

* Ewen Callaway


Reconstruction of a Neanderthal child's face (Image: Anthropological
Institute, University of Zürich)

Talk about a long silence - no one has heard their voices for 30,000
years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up - or at least
a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf.

Robert McCarthy, 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's speech lacked the
"quantal vowel" 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 American Association of Physical
Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11.

"They would have spoken a bit differently. They wouldn't have been
able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken
language," he says.
Talking heads

In the 1970s, linguist Phil Lieberman, 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's 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's team engineered the sound of a Neanderthal saying "E". He
plans to eventually simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence. Listen to
McCarthy's simulation of a Neanderthal voice

In contrast to a modern human "E", the Neanderthal version doesn't
have a quantal hallmark, which helps a listener distinguish the word
"beat" from "bit," 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't fit in with Neanderthals' large brains, which
may have been an adaptation to language, says Erik Trinkaus, an
anthropologist at Washington University in St Louis. "Ultimately what
is important is not the anatomy of the mouth but the neuronal control
of it."

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 - including chimpanzees, our nearest relatives.

Yet other genetic evidence suggests that spoken language shaped the
recent evolution of humans. John Hawks, 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.

"Something's changing in the last 40,000 years," he says. "Maybe this
is because our ears are becoming tuned to listening to sounds that
have recently been changing."




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