Neanderthals Speak Out After 30,000 Years

New Scientist ^ | 4-15-2008 | Ewen Callaway

[blam]

Neanderthals speak out after 30,000 years

15:00 15 April 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal child's face (Image: Anthropological Institute, University of Zürich)

Talk about a long silence – no one has heard their voices for 30,000 years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up – or at least a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf.

Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human's speech lacked the "quantal vowel" sounds that underlie modern speech.

Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another, says McCarthy, who was talking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11.

"They would have spoken a bit differently. They wouldn't have been able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken language," he says.

Talking heads

In the 1970s, linguist Phil Lieberman, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, inferred the dimensions of the larynx of a Neanderthal based on its skull. His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.

Some researchers have criticised this finding, citing archaeological evidence of an oral culture and even errors in Lieberman's original vocal tract reconstruction.

Undeterred, the linguist teamed with McCarthy to simulate Neanderthal speech based on new reconstructions of three Neanderthal vocal tracts. The 50,000-year old fossils all came from France.

By modelling the sounds the Neanderthal pipes would have made, McCarthy's team engineered the sound of a Neanderthal saying "E". He plans to eventually simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence. Listen to McCarthy's simulation of a Neanderthal voice

[OeOeO]

[OeOeO]

Neanderthals Speak Out After 30,000 Years

Me bitter. Cling to club and moon god. vote obama

[occu77]

“Leaders of the study, at Penn State University, warned against interpreting the finding as a discovery of “the race gene.””

So if you reverse the mutation you get a black guy from a white guy? But not a Negro from a Caucasian?

Well, that oughtta be pretty easy to prove empirically.
Let’s have at it!

But I’m still kinda confused.
If the environment caused the mutation then why did it only happen once?

If an advantage like that was so great then you oughtta have white people popping out like hot buttered every time somebody moves north of Ellicott’s Stone.

But then again maybe geography didn’t cause the mutation. Maybe a Neanderthal and a Cro-Magnon mated after getting drunk and standing too close to a uranium deposit in a tar pit. If you get drink and have a kid after standing near uranium in a tar pit I hear all kinds of funny things can happen. Maybe not a lot of useful things, but somebody is bound to get lucky every now and then, ain’t they?

“a finding that helps solve one of biology’s most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity’s greatest sources of strife.”

But I wanna know one other thing since we’re at it. How come these findings always are in the process of helping to solve one of biology’s most enduring mysteries? Just go ahead and offer the proof positive and let’s get the thing solved already. Help is nice and all, and very optimistic in tone, I’ll grnat that, but solutions really stick when the sticking really counts.

So if it’s all the same to these guys then just go ahead and prove it and let’s be done with it. Then we can move on to solving the polar bear problem and reversing all humans to dark skin to better survive the coming age of Global Warming. (By the way, this discovery will help us survive Global Warming won’t it? I mean it’s just a theory so don’t hold me to it like it’s a fact on the internet or nothing. But a trick like that could come in handy by 2012.)

Okay, your turn again.

And please tell me this mutation is reversible.
I burn easy in the sun, and I don’t care much for sunscreen either. Give me something to work with here, will ya?

As a matter of fact if we can reverse this and patent the sucker then just think of the killing we could make in the cosmetic market! You get the proof and I’ll get the venture capital and we’ll both retire to Argentina.

[blam]

"You get the proof and I’ll get the venture capital and we’ll both retire to Argentina."

Get yourself a younger mate...I retired already in 1994.

[Frank_Discussion]

BWAAAAHHHHHAAAAAAAAA!!!!

[aruanan]

I would like to see any of these guys try to make it in Africa. They would be so bitch-slapped so fast they wouldn’t know what hit them.

[occu77]

“Get yourself a younger mate...I retired already in 1994.”

You mean the mutation changes your race and your sex too?
Man, that mutation works like a mutha sumthin!

[Mike-o-Matic]

Dude, what did Danny Bonaduce ever do to you?

[SunkenCiv]

Blam, you know what I like.

The Neandertal Enigma
by James Shreeve

Frayer's own reading of the record reveals a number of overlooked traits that clearly and specifically link the Neandertals to the Cro-Magnons. One such trait is the shape of the opening of the nerve canal in the lower jaw, a spot where dentists often give a pain-blocking injection. In many Neandertal, the upper portion of the opening is covered by a broad bony ridge, a curious feature also carried by a significant number of Cro-Magnons. But none of the alleged 'ancestors of us all' fossils from Africa have it, and it is extremely rare in modern people outside Europe." [pp 126-127]

[SunkenCiv]

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[brityank]

LOL !!
Looks as if the Bubba family tree goes back aways, no?

[CarrotAndStick]

And as far as that goes I’d like to know why whites who go to live in Africa don’t become black again after a few generations. I think I can say the same thing about Jews who retire in Florida and maybe even ex-Nazis summering in Buenos Aires. Why don’t they darken, like double quick, and just stay that way?

Er, that's not how evolution works.

[HoosierHawk]

Thanks for the link, blam.

[pierrem15]

The Neanderthals developed in Europe 100-200K years before moder humans arrived, so it makes sense that the environment would have favored development of the same adaptations to a cold, cloudy climate. The skeletons also show a similar shape with modern Europeans (thicker than Africans with shorter limbs and larger than Asians). This may be genetic, but the notion that modern Europeans are partly descended from Neanderthals seems less and less substantiated by genetic evidence.

One major difference is the incredible muscle development in adult Neanderthal males: about the same as modern weightlifters who press 400+ pounds. You definitely wouldn't want to arm wrestle one in a bar.

[blam]

"Blam, you know what I like. "

Chantilly Lace?

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

Interesting.

IIRC (and I’m not a linguist by any stretch), both classical written Hebrew and classical written Arabic lack symbols for vowels.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

Post of the day! Thank you.

[gleeaikin]

Origin of white Europeans?

blam has posted several interesting articles on this subject which I read a while ago. The need for Vitamin D for the proper formation of bones and a pelvic girdle wide enough to facilitate healthy childbearing was paramount in adapting to cold climates. Melanin blocks the absorbtion of Vitamin D which makes dark skin useful in tropical climes. Think the very dark, Caucasian Dravidians in south India. Wearing clothing is a modern adaptation to protecting whites in the south from too much Vitamin D.

Interesting new discovery. Apparently some depression, especially the winter kind, may be related to insufficient Vitamin D. You can check out your depression by taking about 1,000 units of Vitamin D for a while and see if it makes a difference. If it does, then plan to up your use of Vitamin D or sun exposure as needed. Asians/Eskimos have responded to the Vitamin D problem by having oily skin. Vitamin D forms from skin oils being exposed to the sun. The more skin oil, the more Vitamin D. The Vitamin D is then absorbed into the body. If you have no skin oil or bathe after being in the sun, you won’t get the benefit. It is probably helpful to wait 4 to 6 hours before bathing to allow the Vitamin D to be absorbed. Question, does too much bathing lead to depression?

Scientist are conjecturing that Neanderthals were blue eyed redheads and that this trait is found in a lot of northern Britains/Scotch. I think my husband was one. Heavy bones, strong brow ridge, short legs, the right coloring, very sun sensitive, warrior temperment, Scotch/Viking ancestry. If so, this mutation probably occurred at least 100,000 years ago, or perhaps much earlier and enabled the possessors to survive in Ice Age conditions.

A chance mutation in Africans moving north, would finally have enabled them to compete with the Neanderthal in the closing millenia of the last Ice Age. Otherwise, even if they had traveled there, the women would not have reproduced very effectively because of poor pelvic structure. Scandinavians eating whole sardines and herring would have gotten enough Vitamin D in their diet, without the need for good skin absorbtion. This would also have been true for any African migrant coastal dwellers with that kind of diet, as well as Eskimos.

[ottbmare]

Thank you. That was fascinating.