Neanderthal research about speech (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, June 07, 2024, 15:47 (148 days ago) @ David Turell

They probably had words:

https://psyche.co/ideas/this-is-what-a-neanderthal-conversation-would-have-sounded-like...

"Despite how much we know about them, the Neanderthals remain an enigma – so similar to us, and yet so different. The most striking contrast is the relative absence of technological progression throughout Neanderthal existence.

"This is the puzzle posed by Neanderthals: why have we made so much more technological progress than they did, despite their skill at flaking stone and making tools? Relatedly, why did our art develop from geometric designs at 100,000 years ago to figurative cave paintings by 38,000 years, while Neanderthal ‘art’ remained restricted to a few highly contested scratches and blobs of pigment for more than 300,000 years?

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"Content words can also be divided into iconic and arbitrary words. Iconic words capture a sensory impression of their referent. They include onomatopoeias (such as ‘quack’ and ‘plop’) and words that mimic the size, movement or texture of an object. Languages throughout the world today commonly refer to small, quick things using small words with high front vowels, such as ‘fly’ and ‘bee’, and large things with long words with low back vowels, such as ‘hippopotamus’ and ‘enormous’. Iconic words are found in all modern-day languages and dominate the lexicons of young children. They are, however, poor at conveying detail and insufficient for our needs. That is why we need arbitrary words. These have meanings agreed by convention. A four-legged canine, for instance, can be called a ‘dog’, ‘hund’, ‘chien’ and many other things, depending on the language being spoken.
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"The evidence that Neanderthals had some types of words comes partly from their skeletal remains. Meticulous anatomical studies show that their vocal tracts were nearly identical to ours – overturning previous views that they were unable to generate enough vowels for spoken language. The shape of Neanderthal ear bones and cochlea show that their auditory tracts were also not significantly different to our own, which have been tuned by evolution to the sound frequencies used in speech.

"This isn’t to say that the Neanderthals would have sounded the same as we do. They had larger noses, giving their vowels and consonants more nasal qualities. They also had larger lung capacities, enabling them to speak with longer and louder utterances before needing to draw breath, and allowing their stop consonants (their Bs, Gs, Ks, Ps and Ts) to be even more forceful – or plosive, to use a linguistic term – than ours.

"What types of words were they using? Iconic words for certain. These provided the evolutionary bridge between the barks and grunts of the 6-million-year-old chimpanzee-like ancestor (of all human types) and the arbitrary words that now dominate our vocabulary. Iconic words were likely used by Homo erectus by 1.6 million years ago, these being required for communicating about the hunting and scavenging they undertook. Iconic words alone, however, were insufficient for the more sophisticated and varied hunting done by Neanderthals. They would have needed to distinguish between different types of large animals and types of small animals, types of stone and types of wood. Such fine distinctions would require the use of hybrid and fully arbitrary words.

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"We know from both archaeological and genomic evidence that the Neanderthals lived in particularly small communities. This suggests that their languages likely had the same (and probably exaggerated) features of those so-called esoteric languages found in small speech communities today. It also implies that there would have been a multitude of distinctive Neanderthal languages.

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"Anthropology, neuroscience and genomics have converged on the view that Neanderthals’ brains had a different internal structure than ours. More of their brain matter was devoted to visual processing, restricting what was available for other tasks, such as language. They also had a smaller and differently shaped cerebellum, a brain structure that contributes to language processing, production and fluency. Moreover, several of the genetic changes that occurred in the H sapiens lineage after our split from the Neanderthals influenced our neural networks.

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"For instance, they did not design hunting weapons for killing specific types of animals in specific circumstances, as we find among modern-day hunter-gatherers. To do so requires bringing together what one knows about particular animals, including their physiology and behaviour, with what one knows about artefacts – how to flake stone and sharpen sticks. The Neanderthals did not blend such knowledge, despite having considerable need to do so. The injuries they frequently suffered from close-encounter hunting using thrusting spears could have been avoided by using bows and arrows or thrown spears.

"Being unable to fully connect their semantic clusters of words, the Neanderthals were unable to make use of metaphor – the use of one domain of thought to inform about another. Metaphors have long been recognised as an essential feature of modern-day language for enabling innovative and creative thought."

Comment: that they lacked higher order thinking is why we succeeded, and they failed.