Cosmos, 2/3/2022 • Neanderthals were capable… (1-4)

▤  •  C o s m o s m a g a z i n e  (2 / 3 / 2 0 2 2)  •  … o f  h u m a n  s p e e c h  •

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The closest ancestor to modern humans – Neanderthals – were capable of understanding and producing human speech, according to a new study published by an international team in the journal ‹Nature Ecology and Evolution›.

“This is one of the most important studies I have been involved in during my career”, says anthropologist Rolf Quam, of Binghamton University, US. “The results are solid and clearly show the Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech.

“This is one of the very few current, ongoing research lines relying on fossil evidence to study the evolution of language, a notoriously tricky subject in anthropology”.

The evolution of language, and the linguistic capacities in Neanderthals in particular, is a long-standing question in human evolution. The new study has reconstructed how Neanderthals heard to draw some inferences about how they may have communicated.

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