Neanderthal voices were loud, womanly and probably highly melodic — not the roars and grunts previously assumed by most researchers. Stephen Mithen, professor of archeology at Reading University and author of one of the studies, said: “What is emerging is a picture of an intelligent and emotionally complex creature whose most likely form of communication would have been part language and part song.”
Mithen is giving a seminar on his findings at University College London next week and will publish a book, The Singing Neanderthal: The Origin of Language, Music, Body and Mind, in June.
He studied the Neanderthal voice box and compared it with those of modern humans, monkeys and apes to work out what noises they might have made. “They must have been able to communicate complex ideas and even spirituality. Their anatomy suggests that pitch and melody would have played a key role,” he said.
Mithen’s work coincides with the first detailed study of a reconstructed Neanderthal skeleton. Anthropologists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York brought together bones and casts from several sites to re-create the creature.
Gary Sawyer, the researcher who oversaw the project, will describe the results in Horizon on BBC2 on February 10. The creature that emerges bears marked differences to humans. Neanderthals seem to have had an extremely powerful build and no discernible waist.
Professor Trenton Holliday of Tulane University in New Orleans believes they evolved their stocky body shapes to conserve heat when ice covered the world.
“A short compact body with a voluminous chest would retain heat better in a cold environment,” he said.
Finally! An explanation for Michael Bolton.
"The hills are alive with the sound of cavemen,
with songs they have sung for 10,000 years."
Sounds like they were the first metrosexuals.
So which monkey is singing spiritual songs that led him to deduce this?
SPOTREP - Neanderthal
They would have been perfect for Monty Python skits.
I guess these guys have been watching too many Geico commercials.
London - Red hair may be the genetic legacy of Neanderthals...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1322006/posts
The Neandertal EnigmaFrayer'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]
by James Shreeve
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
bump
Prehistoric Ireland
http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~cd200/mac34.html
The Neanderthals (Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis):
As the ice cap receded across Europe, the high pressure and motion of the ice left behind a layer of powdered stone. This formed an extremely fertile soil, which soon became a vast and fertile grassland. There was an explosion of animal life into this vacuum, which was soon covered with thundering herds of Mammoths, Giant Deer, Bison, and other ungulates. Cave dwelling Neanderthal Man, the heavy set "cave men" of cartoons and comics, was quickly replaced by modern man, and seems to vanish from the record about 34,000 B.C.
We have had such sport lampooning Neanderthal Man, that we tend to forget he was the first known Homo Sapiens. We acknowledge that he is more powerfully built than modern man, but it has recently been shown that he may have been more fleet of foot. For example, he is far better equiped to run sideways than are we - something which may have been very useful during a hunt. We now suspect, from examining tombs, that he was a spiritual being, and more embarrassingly, he had a larger brain than we do.
We may owe more to Neanderthal man and to his Mousterian culture than previously realized. When a Mousterian flute was discovered in the Divje Babe I cave in northwestern Slovenia, a musicologist (Bob Fink) in Saskatchawan, Canada published a study based on spacing of the holes in the bone instrument. Fink maintains that it was tuned to the Diatonic scale, and that our present day ideas of what is musical, may be handed down from our cave dwelling cousins.
There are many theories about the disappearance of Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis , but it is unknown whether he interbred and disappeared, or was killed off by his modern cousins. It is also unknown why he did not adapt to the changing climate, and come to dominate the grasslands.