July 9, 2008 -- Language and associated activities, such as singing, likely emerged well before the first modern humans set foot on Earth, concludes a new study that found a Neanderthal relative possessed hearing consistent with individuals that communicate by speaking.
If they had the equipment, then they must have put it to use, suggests the research team, which was led by geologist Ignacio Martinez Mendizabal of Spain's Alcala University.
"We do believe that language must have appeared at least in the last common ancestor of both the Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens lineages," Mendizabal told Discovery News.
The ancestor was Homo antecessor, who lived around 800,000 to 1,000,000 years ago.
For their study, Mendizabal and his colleagues focused on a more recent member of the family of man, Homo heidelbergensis, which dates to at least 530,000 years ago and predates both Neanderthals and people. This strapping hominid was tall, measuring six feet on average, and had a big head, along with a more muscular physique than modern humans.
The researchers analyzed bones from five such individuals that lived at Sima de los Huesos, a cave in Atapuerca, Spain. Using skull bones, they created very detailed three-dimensional computerized tomography (CT) reconstructions of the cave dwellers' outer and middle ear. CT involves multiple X-ray-like images that serve as thin slices, which gradually build whole body parts or other structures.
The comprehensive model revealed that the Atapuerca human-ish residents had a heightened sensitivity to sounds falling between one and five kilohertz, a range linked to listening to speech that other primates seem to lack.
"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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