Did Neanderthals share speech and language with modern humans?

Washington, July 10 (ANI): Neanderthals were very similar to modern humans and could have shared speech and language with them, according to a study.

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson have argued that modern language and speech can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago.

Initially thought to be subhuman brutes incapable of anything but the most primitive of grunts, the Neandertals were a successful form of humanity inhabiting vast swathes of western Eurasia for several hundreds of thousands of years, during harsh ages and milder interglacial periods.

It's a known fact that they were the closest cousins of humans, sharing a common ancestor with us around half a million years ago (probably Homo heidelbergensis), but it was unclear what their cognitive capacities were like, or why modern humans succeeded in replacing them after thousands of years of cohabitation.

Dediu and Levinson argued that essentially modern language and speech are an ancient feature of our lineage dating back at least to the most recent ancestor we shared with the Neandertals and the Denisovans (another form of humanity known mostly from their genome).

Their interpretation of the intrinsically ambiguous and scant evidence goes against the scenario usually assumed by most language scientists, namely that of a sudden and recent emergence of modernity, presumably due to a single - or very few - genetic mutations.

This pushes back the origins of modern language by a factor of 10 from the often-cited 50 or so thousand years, to around a million years ago - somewhere between the origins of our genus, Homo, some 1.8 million years ago, and the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis.

This reassessment of the evidence goes against a saltationist scenario where a single catastrophic mutation in a single individual would suddenly give rise to language, and suggests that a gradual accumulation of biological and cultural innovations is much more plausible.

The findings have been published in Frontiers in Language Sciences. (ANI)