Neanderthal hearing was tuned for language like ours

摘要

VIRTUAL reconstructions of Neanderthal ears show that our extinct cousins had the same physical capacity for hearing as modern humans. This implies they could make the sounds we can, although whether they actually spoke a language is still unknown. "We don't know if they had a language, but at least they had all the anatomical parts needed to have the kind of speech that we have," says Mercedes Conde-Valverde at the University of Alcala in Spain. "It's not that they had the same language, not English, not Spanish, nothing like this. But if we could hear them, we would recognise that they were humans."