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Ask-A-Linguist - Message details
Subject: Neanderthal communication
Question:
Hello!

I've been trying to find information on Neanderthal speech/language/communication but it's hard to tell whether the search results I got are reliable or not. Is there any kind of agreement on this matter? I mean, if they had a fully developed vocal tract as some seem to believe, did this allow them to produce articulate sounds? It is clear that the evidence on this is scant and this is what I would like to know:

1. Could Neanderthals build communication amongst them (could they speak at all)?
2. Did they use sounds to communicate?
3. Did they use any kind of articulate sounds?
4. Did they use gestures?
5. What sources of information can you recommend for further reading?

I'd really appreciate any information you can provide. By the way, this is just something I'm interested in because I'm reading a novel where Neanderthals speak and it aroused my curiosity.

Thanks!
Brian

Reply:
Hi, Brian,

As Madalena points out, people disagree even with themselves on these themes. One of Lieberman's early points was that (and as far as I know this is still true), no hyoid bone has been recovered ever for any sort of hominid fossil older than a few years. Since this bone, crucial for tongue movement and positioning, is not articulated directly with other bones, even finding one would not necessarily help in reconstructing the specimen's vocal tract anatomy. As few paleologists and linguists are aware (some of those mentioned --and mentioning-- are exceptions), the pharynx is precisely that supposedly nonexistent 'speech organ' whose only imaginable beneficial use is for facilitating speech [it also has the effect of making humans the only mammal that cannot both make vocal sounds and eat at the same time, since doing so risks choking and death]. The most reasonable interpretation of the fossil evidence is that development of the pharynx, without which we could not have human languages in their current form, only began about 300K years ago, or at most 500K years (a process which seems not to have finished until about 100K years ago, when modern man first appeared on the scene).

Some of your questions are very easy to answer: did they have vocal communication? Clearly, yes: since all higher (ie, larger) primates currently have vocal communication, predecessors of humans must have had it also. The same answer, based on the same kind of reasoning, can be given about gestures.

I don't know what you mean by making a difference between 'sounds' and 'articulate sounds'. The only sensible interpretation, I suppose, of the latter term as you use it would be 'sounds made with a mobile and easily directable tongue', but much of the musculature which permits us this mobility was only the evolutionary result of the development of the pharynx (at least in my interpretation of the fossil evidence) and thus is lacking in other primates (and a fortiori in other animals). In this sense, other primates are on a par with some birds, except that some of the birds [using a totally different sort of mechanism] can at least make sounds which are similar to human language (and are intelligent enough to make them in appropriate contexts distinctively, just like some primates can do with non-vocal types of language).

Another source you might look at is work by the late comparative zoologist/primatologist Jan Wind, including as (co)editor of various volumes on the evolution of human language.

I hope this is of some use. Good luck.

Jim

James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, México

Reply From: James L Fidelholtz    click here to access email
Date: Sep-30-2009
Other Replies:
  1. Re: Neanderthal communication Madalena Cruz-Ferreira    (Sep-30-2009)
  2. Re: Neanderthal communication Elizabeth J Pyatt    (Sep-30-2009)
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