Neanderthal behavior

Almost everything of Neanderthal behaviour is controversial. From their physiology, Neanderthals are presumed to have been omnivores, but animal protein formed the majority of their dietary protein, showing them to have been apex predators and not scavengers. Some studies suggest they cooked vegetables.

Few Neanderthals lived past 35. Nothing indicates trade with other communities, and toolmaking changed little between 300,000 and 50,000 BP. (The same may be said during this time of anatomically modern humans.)

It is not known whether Neanderthals were anatomically capable of speech, and if they were whether they actually spoke. A once widely believed theory that the Neanderthal vocal tract was different from that of living humans, and that they hence probably could not speak, is now discredited. The only bone in the vocal tract is the hyoid, but being fragile, no Neanderthal hyoid was found until 1983, when excavators discovered a well-preserved one on Neanderthal Kebara 2, Israel. It was largely similar to that of living humans. Although the original excavators claimed that the similarity of this bone with that of living humans implied Neanderthals were anatomically capable of speech, it is not possible to reconstruct the vocal tract with information supplied by the hyoid. In particular, it does not allow to determine whether the larynx of its owner was in a low-lying position, a feature considered important in producing speech.

A 2013 study on the Kebara hyoid used X-ray microtomography and finite element analysis to conclude that the Neanderthal hyoid showed microscopic features more similar to a modern human's hyoid than to a chimpanzee hyoid. To the authors, this suggested the Neanderthal hyoid was used similarly to that in living humans, that is, to produce speech. Yet, because the authors did not compare the microscopic structure of the Kebara 2 hyoid with that of speech-hindered living humans, this result is not yet conclusive.

Although some researchers believe Neanderthal tool-making is too complex for them not to have had language, toolmaking experiments of Levallois technology, the most common Neanderthal toolmaking technique, have found that living humans can learn it in silence.

Neanderthals had the same DNA-coding region of the FOXP2 gene as living humans, but are different in one position of the gene's regulatory regions, and the extent of FOXP2 expression might hence have been different in Neanderthals. Although the gene appears necessary for language — living humans who don't have the normal human version of the gene have serious language difficulties — it is not necessarily sufficient. It is not known whether FOXP2 evolved for or in conjunction with language, nor whether there are other language-related genes that Neanderthals may or may not have had.

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