Study of Neanderthal Speech Articulation
Speech is one of the fundamental abilities that separates modern humans from other species. In this study we considered whether there was evidence for the ability to articulate speech in the Neanderthal fossil record. The question of whether Neanderthals could speak has been much discussed in the literature with two dominant and often fiercely opposed views differentiated by the predicted location of the hyoid bone at the root of the tongue: the high hyoid hypothesis suggests Neanderthals had a tongue morphology like chimpanzees and could not articulate the full range of modern human vowels; the low hyoid hypothesis maintains that the hyoid and tongue root were located well inside the pharynx, as for a modern human, and a full vowel range could be produced.
Our model was based on high resolution scans of Neanderthal fossil samples and on modern human data. From a statistical analysis of the relative location of anatomical landmarks we made predictions of the likely range of hyoid locations for Neanderthals.
To explore the potential for vowel production, a set of bone landmarks have been defined for reference anatomies (for example a modern human; a chimpanzee) that included a vocal tract. The reference anatomy can be morphed onto a Neanderthal anatomy with a chosen hyoid location by a user-defined set of transformation rules to make a prediction for the shape of the Neanderthal vocal tract. Acoustic analysis then allows the range of vowel sounds producible by this vocal tract to be calculated and compared to that producible by the reference tract. We did not therefore attempt to make a categorical model of Neanderthal anatomy, preferring to develop software that allowed different hypotheses to be tested.
People
- Dr Anna Barney
- Dr Antoine Serrurier
- Dr James Steele, Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, University College London
- Dr Sandra Martelli, Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, University College London