Neanderthals May Have Shared Speech and Language with Modern Humans

Neanderthals died out hundreds of thousands of years ago, possibly even killed off by our ancient ancestors. Yet a growing body of evidence seems to point to the fact that our distant cousins had more in common with us than we first thought. New research reveals that Neanderthals may have shared speech with modern humans.

Neanderthals were first discovered about 200 years ago. Although they were first thought to be subhuman creatures, incapable of anything but the most primitive grunts, new research reveals otherwise. Neanderthals successfully inhabited vast swathes of western Eurasia for several hundreds of thousands of years, which included extreme periods of cold and milder interglacial periods. Despite knowing this, though, researchers have been unable to determine exactly what a Neanderthal's cognitive abilities may have been like.

In order to find out a little bit more about Neanderthals, researchers have examined ancient DNA and have reassessed older data with new tools. They've slowly realized that the fate of the Neanderthals was closely intertwined with our own and that it is very likely that this species had cognitive capacities and culture that was comparable to our own. Yet researchers have long wondered how language might have factored in.

This latest paper is the result of the work of researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen Levinson, who argue that modern language and speech can actually be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neanderthals roughly half a million years ago. Their findings go against the scenario usually assumed by most language scientists--namely that there was a relatively sudden and recent emergence of modernity, presumably due to a single (or very few) genetic mutations.

So what does this mean exactly? The researchers argue that the origins of language emerged far earlier which also means that Neanderthals probably had access to the same kinds of language skills that humans did.

The new study isn't all that farfetched. The archaeological record has revealed that modern humans spreading out from Africa interacted both genetically and culturally with the Neanderthals and Denisovans. It's very possible that these various peoples had similar languages--or were at least able to communicate with one another. Yet more hard evidence will need to be discovered before any firm conclusions are drawn.

The findings are published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.