Neanderthals Speak after 30,000 Years

Scientists have used fossil evidence and a computer synthesizer to simulate what Neanderthals sounded like 30,000 years ago.

Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton anthropologist, Robert McCarthy, told newscientist.com that he used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to figure out how the Neanderthals sounded.

Although McCarthy claims that the ancient humans spoke, he concludes that they sounded very different.  The Neanderthals lacked the “quantal vowel” sounds present in modern speech.  After remodeling the larynx, McCarthy compared the Neanderthal “e” to that of a modern “e”, revealing that it lacked the ability to distinguish the difference between the words “beat” from “bit” for example.

The scientist based his models on 50,000 year old fossils from France.  He hopes to simulate a full sentence from the models.