Our closest cousins — the Neanderthals — may have shared speech and language with modern humans, a new research suggests.
Fast-accumulating data seem to indicate that Neanderthals were much more similar to us than imagined even a decade ago. The researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson from the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, argue that modern language and speech can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neanderthals roughly half a million years ago.
Initially thought to be subhuman brutes incapable of anything but the most primitive of grunts, they were 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, researchers said.
It is known that they were our closest cousins, sharing a common ancestor with us around half a million years ago (probably Homo heidelbergensis), but it was unclear what their cognitive capacities were like, or why modern humans succeeded in replacing them after thousands of years of cohabitation.