"Our results show that the audition of hominids of the Sima de los Huesos was equivalent to ours, and clearly different to that of the chimpanzees," Mendizabal said. He and his team recently presented the findings at the Acoustics '08 meeting in Paris. The hearing range they detected indicates H. heidelbergensis spent around 90 percent of its time listening to sounds that fall within the bandwidth of speech. Their hearing was best suited to such noises, even though they could also listen to other sounds, just as we can today. Earlier this year, another team discovered that Neanderthals possessed versions of a gene, FOXP2, linked to language and speech. Lead author Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology told Discovery News "from the point of this gene, there is no reason to think that Neanderthals did not have language as we do." Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, built upon that work, using reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate what these burly beings would have sounded like. It's probable they lacked the capacity to produce certain vowels, such as the "eee" sound, which McCarthy believes came out more as "aye." Mendizabal supports this recent work, agreeing "their vocalizations must have been somewhat different from ours, due to the greater length of their oral cavity." "Nevertheless," he added, "our results show that, despite these differences, their oral communication system could have been as efficient as ours." Related Links: Jennifer Viegas' blog: Born Animal Discovery News blog: Archaeorama Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
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