Did Neandertals have language?
Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - 12:01
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Fast-accumulating data seem to indicate that our close cousins, the Neandertals, were much more similar to us than imagined even a decade ago. But did they have anything like modern speech and language? And if so, what are the implications for understanding present-day linguistic diversity? Modern language and speech can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago, according to new resaerch.