Neanderthals Sang Like Sopranos

Neanderthals spoke in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, says one researcher. But not everyone is convinced (Image: iStockphoto)

Neanderthals had strong, yet high-pitched, voices that the stocky hominins used for both singing and speaking, says a UK researcher.

The theory suggests that Neanderthals, who once lived in Europe from around 200,000 to 35,000 BC, were intelligent and socially complex.

It also indicates that although Neanderthals were likely to have represented a unique species, they had more in common with modern humans than previously thought.

Stephen Mithen, a professor of archaeology at the University of Reading, made the determination after studying the skeletal remains of Neanderthals.

His work coincides with last week's release of the first complete, articulated Neanderthal skeleton.

Information about the new skeleton is published in the current issue of the journal The Anatomical Record Part B: The New Anatomist.

Mithen compared related skeletal Neanderthal data with that of monkeys and other members of the ape family, including modern humans.

In a recent University College London seminar, Mithen explained that Neanderthal anatomy suggests the early hominins had the physical ability to communicate with pitch and melody.

He believes they probably used these abilities in a form of communication that was half spoken and half sung.

Mithen says he hopes people who are interested in his research will read his upcoming book The singing Neanderthal: the origin of language, music, body and mind, which will be published in June.

Jeffrey Laitman is professor and director of anatomy and functional morphology, as well as otolaryngology, the study of the ear, nose, and throats, at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

He is also an expert on Neanderthals, particularly in terms of analysing their head and neck regions.

"My curiosity is peaked by Mithen's theory that Neanderthals sang and had feminine-toned voices. But I think these attributes would be difficult to prove even with the recent Neanderthal reconstruction," Laitman says.

"No Neanderthal larynx exists because the tissue does not fossilise. We have to reconstruct it."

Laitman says he and other researchers often use existing portions of Neanderthal, and other early hominin skulls to build the voice box area.

Through such work, he has learned that Neanderthals, Australopithecines and other prehistoric hominins had a larynx positioned high in the throat.

"The structure is comparable to what we see in monkeys and apes today," Laitman says. "Apes do have language and culture, but the sounds they make are more limited than those produced by humans."

Due to the Neanderthal's impressive brain size, which was larger than the grey matter of most modern humans, Laitman emphatically believes they had linguistic abilities.

"They were not mute brutes just because they were not exactly like us," he says. "Neanderthals probably made different sounds because, in part, they could not have used all of the vowels we do. For example, they could not have said 'ooh', 'ahh' or 'eee'."

Since Neanderthals had distinctive nasal, ear and sinus anatomical features, Laitman believes they were specialised for respiration, which would have given them a 'nasally' voice.

It is unclear why the larynx of modern humans dropped lower in the throat around a million and a half years ago.

Laitman thinks the change might have been linked to desired extra air intake through the mouth for short-burst running.

Associate Professor Janet Monge, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and another Neanderthal expert, is sceptical about the new singing Neanderthal theory.

"[But] if we sing, then I am sure that all very modern looking ancient humans could too," she says.

She says that language and singing do not use the same neurosubstrates, so she questions how a link could be made between the two, especially since in humans, language can be melodious and high-pitched without literally moving into full song.

But Monge adds, "Certainly linking language to Neanderthals makes them more like modern humans."

Laitman believes Neanderthals were a separate species that modern humans actually helped to kill off.

"Their ear, nose, and throat anatomy would have made them very susceptible to respiratory infections and to middle ear infections," he says.

"We know they traded and were in contact with modern humans, so Neanderthals would have been in harm's way for germs.

"In the days before cures like penicillin, illness could have flown through their populations very quickly and contributed to their demise."

Neanderthals Like Us
by Karen Wright
Even today, features thought to be Neanderthal are as familiar as the portraits in a grandparent's home: the sloping forehead, the heavy brow, the stocky, big-boned physique... many Neanderthal features persist in European visages today: a unique hole in the jawbone, the shape of a suture in the cheek, a highly angled nose... Meanwhile, archaeologists are questioning their assumptions about the Neanderthal lifestyle. In particular, it has become less clear exactly who invented the Upper Paleolithic. One assemblage in France, dated between 39,000 and 34,000 years ago, has bone and shell pendants, carved teeth and beads, as well as finely worked tools like the Cro-Magnons used. But the only bones found with this technology are Neanderthal... [Ian] Tattersall says studies that use DNA from contemporary populations to reconstruct human genealogy support the idea of a single, small source of Homo sapiens... The mtDNA extracted from Neanderthal bones doesn't match anything in the modern world. But last year, when geneticists compared mtDNA from an early modern Australian with contemporary mtDNA, it didn't match either."

old links, probably expired, emphasis mine:

Fathers can be influential too
by Eleanor Lawrence
Biologists have warned for some years that paternal mitochondria do penetrate the human egg and survive for several hours... Erika Hagelberg from the University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues... were carrying out a study of mitochondrial DNAs from hundreds of people from Papua-New Guinea and the Melanesian islands in order to study the history of human migration into this region of the western Pacific... People from all three mitochondrial groups live on Nguna. And, in all three groups, Hagelberg's group found the same mutation, a mutation previously seen only in an individual from northern Europe, and nowhere else in Melanesia, or for that matter anywhere else in the world... Adam Eyre-Walker, Noel Smith and John Maynard Smith from the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK confirm this view with a mathematical analysis of the occurrence of the so-called 'homoplasies' that appear in human mitochondrial DNA... reanalysis of a selection of European and African mitochondrial DNA sequences by the Sussex researchers suggests that recombination is a far more likely cause of the homoplasies, as they find no evidence that these sites are particularly variable over all lineages.
Is Eve older than we thought?
by Sanjida O'Connell 15th April 1999
"Two studies prove that the estimation of both when and where humanity first arose could be seriously flawed... The ruler scientists have been using is based on genetic changes in mitochondria, simple bacteria that live inside us and control the energy requirements of our cells. Mitochondria are passed from mother to daughter and their genes mutate at a set rate which can be estimated - so many mutations per 1,000 years... However, these calculations are based upon a major assumption which, according to Prof John Maynard Smith, from Sussex University, is 'simply wrong'. The idea that underpins this dating technique is that mitochondria, like some kinds of bacteria, do not have sex... Two groups of researchers, Prof Maynard Smith and colleagues Adam Eyre-Walker and Noel Smith, also from Sussex, and Dr Erika Hagelberg and colleagues from the University of Otago, New Zealand, have found that mitochondria do indeed have sex - which means that genes from both males and females is mixed and the DNA in their offspring is very different... Prof Maynard Smith and his colleagues stumbled over mitochondria having sex in the process of tracking the spread of bacterial resistance to meningitis... For the 'out-of-Africa' theory to hold water, the first population would have to have been very small. Sexually rampant mitochondria may put paid to this idea. Maynard Smith thinks that the origin of humanity is much older - may be twice as old - which, according to Eyre-Walker, means we are likely to have evolved in many different areas of the world and did not descend from Eve in Africa."

This one was on the NYTimes website, but was later in the (pay to view) archive there:

Scientist Reveals Genome Secret: It's Him

Scientist Reveals Genome Secret: It's Him
by Nicholas Wade
April 27, 2002
When scientists at Celera Genomics announced two years ago that they had decoded the human genome, they said the genetic data came from anonymous donors and presented it as a universal human map. But the scientist who led the effort, Dr. J. Craig Venter, now says that the genome decoded was largely his own. Dr. Venter also says that he started taking fat-lowering drugs after analyzing his genes... [M]embers of Celera's scientific advisory board expressed disappointment that Dr. Venter subverted the anonymous selection process that they had approved... Though the five individuals who contributed to Celera's genome are marked by separate codes, Dr. Venter's is recognizable as the largest contribution. He said he had inherited from one parent the variant gene known as apoE4, which is associated with abnormal fat metabolism and the risk of Alzheimer's, and that he was taking fat-lowering drugs to counteract its effects... Dr. Arthur Caplan, a biomedical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said, "Any genome intended to be a landmark should be kept anonymous. It should be a map of all us, not of one, and I am disappointed if it is linked to a person."

Venter spent millions or billions of other people's money so he would know to take fat fighting meds. Other folks get fired for surfin' the web at work. Still others claim that the DNA from one person shows that we're all 99+ per cent genetically identical. Life is an absurd theater at times.

Neandertals had bigger braincases, so it may have been less likely that hybridization took place between Cro-Magnon females and Neandertal males. These were all home deliveries you know. Despite the cumulative influence of the father's mtDNA, the descendants of early hybrids are likely to have mostly their Neandertal mom's mtDNA. While some hybrids may have Cro-Magnon moms, these would be swamped by hybrids with Neandertal moms.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

· join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic ·
	Gods Graves Glyphs	Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are Blam, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
· Google · Archaeologica · ArchaeoBlog · Archaeology magazine · Biblical Archaeology Society · · Mirabilis · Texas AM Anthropology News · Yahoo Anthro & Archaeo · · History or Science & Nature Podcasts · Excerpt, or Link only? · cgk's list of ping lists ·