Posted on 04/15/2008 6:35:51 PM PDT by 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
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
GGG Ping.
For a second I thought it was about Obama rally.
We almost never say that.
Famous last neanderthal words:
“Change.”
Who needs megabucks research... just listen to Frank Lautenberg speak!!!
Thay are a bit whiny though:
There’s a Far Side cartoon here somewhere.
All of the speaking from the “Geico cavemen” doesn’t count?
That's absolute B.S., in my opinion. Given sufficient intelligence they could have produced a language out of any combination of sounds.
Here’s a question I have never seen asked, much less answered: when did white people come into existence?
I don’t mean to be facetious. I just surmise that people originally started off dark, if humanity began in Africa. Animals that need sun protection either have hair or dark skin, and so do people. But as people move into areas in which there is less sunlight, not only do they need less protection but the melanin that protects them from overexposure to the sun may also prevent them from acquiring enough Vitamin D. It has even been suggested that the high incidence of asthma in black people living in the US may come from chronic prenatal Vitamin D deprivation. (Nice hypothesis but remains to be demonstrated conclusively.) So I’m wondering if unpigmented mutations were able to survive after our ancestors moved into northern Europe and northern Asia. Possible? Feel free to shoot this down, I’d like to hear alternative ideas.
Reconstruction of a Neanderthal child's face (Image: Anthropological Institute, University of Zürich)
A fair-skinned, light-haired Neaderthal? I thought that look came much later, but I'm not a student of evolution.
“I thought their diction was good.”
“You could understand everything they said...”
I guess it beats having a real job. I’d hate to think, as I breathed my last breath, that I had wasted my time making up a sound that a Neanderthal might have made 30,000 years ago.
And to think that universities actually pay these people handsomely for such useless drivel that will never help anyone to anything better in this world.
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