Neandertal

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In this paper we briefly review several recent lines of evidence concerning Neandertal language and speech capacity, aiming to dispel the idea —still held in some influential circles— that the Neandertals were an inarticulate not quite human species, arguing instead that they were probably not very different biologically or cognitively from us, and that their linguistic capacities were closely similar to our own.

Supporting these patterns of successful admixture is the finding that modern humans, Neandertals and Denisovans share a karyotype with 23 pairs of chromosomes as opposed to the other great apes which have 24.

Estimates have been on the order of 170–700 kya for the Denisovan-modern human population split (Meyeretal., 2012) and 270–440 kya for the Neandertal-modern human split (Green et al.,2010), but recent reassessments of mutation rates suggest, e.g., 420 to 780 k for the latter (Hawks,2012).

One consequence is that we should probably stop thinking about these three lineages as separate species [in the sense of Mayr’s (1942) Biological Species Concept where interbreeding is definitional, but see Hey(2001) for many alternative definitions].

Nevertheless,the genetic story so far suggests that Neandertals and Denisovans had the basic genetic underpinnings for recognizably modern language and speech, but it is possible that modern humans may outstrip them in some parameters (perhaps range of speech sounds or rapidity of speech, complexity of syntax, size of vocabularies, or the like).