The Language Of Neanderthals
Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - 15:40
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Our prehistoric close cousins, the Neandertals, were more similar than science used to think in a variety of ways. And according to a new paper, they had something resembling modern speech and language, which can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago. Neanderthals have fascinatedthe academic world and the general public ever since their discovery almost 200 years ago. Initially thought to be sub-human brutes incapable of anything but the most primitive of grunts, they were later found to be a successful form of humanity inhabiting vast swathes of western Eurasia for several hundreds of thousands of years, during harsh ages and milder interglacial periods. read more