Neanderthal Bone

Neanderthal Bone

Copyright, 1989. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

By MALCOLM RITTER AP Science Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — A 60,000-year-old Neanderthal neck bone resembles its counterpart in modern humans, suggesting the ancient creatures were anatomically equipped to speak, researchers reported today.

Scientists are interested in the Neanderthal’s capability for those sounds because it bears on the question of whether Neanderthals were direct ancestors of modern man or simply an evolutionary dead end.

The discovery of the tiny, U-shaped bone is reported in the British journal Nature by researchers from Israel, France and Moorhead State University in Minnesota.

Other scientists said the find is unlikely to end the debate about Neanderthal speech capabilities.

The Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia until about 35,000 years ago, undoubtedly did communicate in some fashion because their culture was relatively advanced, scientists say. The debate is whether they were physically able to speak.

The new fossil, unearthed from Kebara Cave at Mount Carmel in Israel, is a hyoid bone. In the body, the hyoid lies between the root of the tongue and the larynx.

In the Nature paper, the researchers said the fossil bone is almost identical in size and shape to modern hyoids. Along with other evidence, that suggests that that the larynx, or voice box, also may not have changed over 60,000 years, they said.

If so, the anatomical equipment for human-like speech may have been in place that long ago, they wrote.

But Jeffrey Laitman, who has studied the speech capabilities of humankind’s ancestors, said he believes the new finding does not shed light on Neanderthals.

For one thing, he said, scientists do not know what the hyoid bone of older human ancestors looked like. So the significance of the discovered bone’s appearance is not clear, said Laitman, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Secondly, he said he does not see how the isolated bone will help scientists determine the position of the larynx in the throat. He called that crucial to the question of Neanderthal’s speech capabilities.

The larynx is lower in the throat of modern humans than it was in very early ancestors, he said. The lower position allows for the space above it to act as a resonating chamber, which is required for fully articulate speech, he said.

In an editorial accompanying the Nature paper, John Marshall of the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford, England, cautioned that determining function from anatomy is tricky.

The argument about Neanderthal language capability, he wrote, “will undoubtedly run and run until we discover a deep-frozen Neanderthal who is susceptible to resuscitation.”

A second report in Nature confirms an earlier study that suggested anatomically modern humans lived in the Middle East some 90,000 years ago. That was more than twice the age scientists had been able to establish reliably for the existence of anatomically modern humans.

Scientists from Britain, Canada and Israel studied the age of cattle teeth associated with human remains in the Skhul cave at Mount Carmel. They found that the teeth, and so the humans, are at least about 81,000 years old and more probably about 101,000 years old.

That resembles the age of about 92,000 years reported last year for similar humans in the Qafzeh cave in Israel.

Anatomically modern humans may have occupied the area only intermittently during that era, study co-author Christopher Stringer said in an interview.

Neanderthals probably were more established there, but it is not clear whether they encountered the anatomically modern humans, said Stringer, curator of fossil hominids at the British Museum (Natural History) in London.