Neanderthal language

Neanderthal behaviour is subject to much study and speculation. 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 not scavengers. However, new studies indicate that they had cooked vegetables in their diet. They made advanced tools, had language (the nature of which is debated) and lived in complex social groups.

Neanderthal brains were somewhat larger than humans but were shaped a bit differently since they evolved separately for several hundred thousand years. The size and distribution of archaeological sites shows that Neanderthals spent their lives mostly in small groups of 5-10 individuals (compared to 20-30 individuals for Cro-Magnon humans). Elders were rare as few Neanderthals lived past 35.

Skeletal evidence shows that injured individuals were often nursed back to health by others. Neanderthals rarely made contact with outsiders or traveled outside their small home territories. Although many Neanderthal sites have rare pieces of high-quality stone from more than 100 kilometers away, there is not enough to indicate trade or even regular contact with other communities.

It has been suggested by one pair of researchers that these stones may instead be "gifts" brought by adolescents wishing to join a new community (some form of "marrying out" was essential due to the small size of Neanderthal territories). In their view, this lack of trade could indicate that Neanderthals may have lacked some cognitive abilities for dealing with strangers, such as "cheater detection" and the ability to judge the value of one commodity in terms of another. Neanderthals had a smaller cognitive part of the brain and this would have limited them, including their ability to form larger groups. The quality of tools found at archaeological sites is further said to suggest that Neanderthals were good at "expert" cognition, a form of observational learning and practice acquired through apprenticeship that relies heavily on long-term procedural memory.

Neanderthal toolmaking supposedly changed little over hundreds of thousands of years. The lack of innovation was said to imply they may have had a reduced capacity for thinking by analogy and less working memory. The researchers further speculated that Neanderthal behaviour would probably seem neophobic, dogmatic and xenophobic to modern humans.

The idea that Neanderthals lacked complex language was once widespread, despite concerns about the accuracy of reconstructions of the Neanderthal vocal tract, until 1983, when a Neanderthal hyoid bone was found at the Kebara Cave in Israel. The hyoid is a small bone that connects the musculature of the tongue and the larynx, and by bracing these structures against each other, allows a wider range of tongue and laryngeal movements than would otherwise have been possible. The presence of this bone implies that structured speech was anatomically possible and that the repertory of sounds that might be produced was wide enough to contain well-defined sets of phonemes, and not simply inarticulate guttural grunts. The bone found is virtually identical to that of modern humans. A recent study on the Kebara hyoid has used X-ray microtomography and finite element analysis to compare it to modern human hyoids. The study concluded that the Neanderthal hyoid showed histological features and micro-chemical behaviour similar to a modern human's hyoid, indicating that the two were used in the same way.

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