Scientists have recreated what they believe to be the voice of Neanderthals.
New Scientist has very short audio clips contrasting the Neanderthal and modern human speech. Link -via Yahoo News
(image credit: Anthropological Institute, University of Zürich)
Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human's speech lacked the "quantal vowel" sounds that underlie modern speech.
Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another, says McCarthy, who was talking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11.
"They would have spoken a bit differently. They wouldn't have been able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken language," he says.
New Scientist has very short audio clips contrasting the Neanderthal and modern human speech. Link -via Yahoo News
(image credit: Anthropological Institute, University of Zürich)
Are they actually proud of that quarter-second blip?
(snicker)
Just read them and have the nerve to consider our species superior. lol
He couldn't pronounce the 'ee' phoneme, so he had to refer to the character Mary as "Mare".