Listen to Neanderthals speak
Neanderthal model
(Credit: Nascigl. GNU Free Documentation license.)
Researchers are recovering the lost voice of the Neanderthals after 30,000 years of silence. Neanderthals were humans’ closest cousins. Now their vocal tract has been reconstructed by Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton.
Robert McCarthy: What I and my colleagues did is to try to predict where the voice box, where the hyroid bone and tongue would have been positioned in the throats of Neanderthals and other fossil hominids.
A computer synthesizer imagined how the Neanderthal “E” would have sounded:
Compare that to our human “E”:
That “E” is the difference between saying “bit” and “beat.” Neanderthals wouldn’t have been able to voice that distinction, meaning their speech was likely less expressive than ours.
Robert McCarthy: It might have been a little bit slower, it might have been a little bit more difficult to perceive, in the sense that there might have been more errors. But I think that they could have had a very complex spoken language.
McCarthy hopes to simulate an entire sentence of Neanderthal speech. Although they were way before Shakespeare’s time, he would like to have the Neanderthals quote Hamlet: “What a piece of work is man.”
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