Posted on 04/15/2008 6:35:51 PM PDT by blam
Neanderthals speak out after 30,000 years
15:00 15 April 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway
Reconstruction of a Neanderthal child's face (Image: Anthropological Institute, University of Zürich)
Talk about a long silence – no one has heard their voices for 30,000 years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up – or at least a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf.
Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human's speech lacked the "quantal vowel" sounds that underlie modern speech.
Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another, says McCarthy, who was talking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11.
"They would have spoken a bit differently. They wouldn't have been able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken language," he says.
Talking heads
In the 1970s, linguist Phil Lieberman, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, inferred the dimensions of the larynx of a Neanderthal based on its skull. His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.
Some researchers have criticised this finding, citing archaeological evidence of an oral culture and even errors in Lieberman's original vocal tract reconstruction.
Undeterred, the linguist teamed with McCarthy to simulate Neanderthal speech based on new reconstructions of three Neanderthal vocal tracts. The 50,000-year old fossils all came from France.
By modelling the sounds the Neanderthal pipes would have made, McCarthy's team engineered the sound of a Neanderthal saying "E". He plans to eventually simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence. Listen to McCarthy's simulation of a Neanderthal voice
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
My teenager still uses these grunting sounds whenever he stirs from his cave!
Mel
“Some researchers have criticised this finding, citing archaeological evidence of an oral culture and even errors in Lieberman’s original vocal tract reconstruction.
Undeterred, the linguist teamed with McCarthy to simulate Neanderthal speech based on new reconstructions of three Neanderthal vocal tracts. The 50,000-year old fossils all came from France. “
Ah.....criticism of scientific conclusions??? by other scientists??? about the neanderthal “voice” ?????
How could that be! Those critics must be looney, right wing creationist wackos.
Yet the headline stands.....so the “fame” is generated for this “researcher” who ignores the criticism from his peers
Garbage.
... and the first words uttered by Neanderthal man was ...
“Stop global warming.”
“E”? I thought Neanderthals said things like “I am Lothar, of the Hill People.”
Now what exactly does that have to do with the Blair Witch Project? ;-D
Maybe the Neanderthals died out because they couldn’t get laid either.
That kid lives right down the road, moved here from up Nawth!
The child has appeared to be the most intelligent person in every picture.
Has that ever been said about you?
;<)
Lol.....took me a minute to see the looter guy in that photo.
“Here’s a question I have never seen asked, much less answered: when did white people come into existence?”
And as far as that goes I’d like to know why whites who go to live in Africa don’t become black again after a few generations. I think I can say the same thing about Jews who retire in Florida and maybe even ex-Nazis summering in Buenos Aires. Why don’t they darken, like double quick, and just stay that way?
But to answer your question I think whites first appeared when the potatoes named after them began to be cultivated and about the same time that whiskey was invented. No, excuse me, I somehow confused white people with the Irish. My bad.
I give up, when did they first appear? If it was during the last Ice Age then I wonder why the Indians and the Asians didn’t lighten up too so as to better camouflage themselves in the snow. That would make hunting mammoths a whole lot easier because then they couldn’t see you sneaking up on them across the tundra.
Speaking of which why don’t polar bears become grizzlies when they’re moved to live in the San Francisco zoo? Nevermind, I think I just answered my own question.
Okay, your turn...
Make it count.
“Some of them must have...”
Well, there’s no accounting for taste, is there?
That Image came from a skeleton that many think is a Neanderthal/Modern Human Hybrid. The original image and story is at the link below.
Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin
Your turn again.
It seems that the Clinton’s have been in politics much long than we had thought.
I’m not going to get any sleep tonight...that’s just spooky!
And in a related development, a team of University translators studying an ancient neanderthal cave graphic have concluded the meaning to be roughly equivalent to “Can you loan me ten dollars?”
“How the hell did you come to that conclusion, Jim Eagle Feather? It could just as easily have been true that they were in fact littering, alcoholic kitty beating bastards.”
My favorite so far. :)
I hope so. I frown on Al, Jesse, and The Magic Negroe.
>
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