Study suggests that Neandertals shared speech and language with modern humans
July 10, 2013 at 1:04 am
http://scienceblog.com/64490/study-sugge...rn-humans/
I'm always uncomfortable with these distinctions of various ancient humans as "species." We already know at HNS and HSS interbred as did HNS and the Denisovans. That would seem to throw a monkey wrench into the more strict definition of "species" to begin with.
Quote:Fast-accumulating data seem to indicate that our close cousins, the Neandertals, were much more similar to us than imagined even a decade ago. But did they have anything like modern speech and language? And if so, what are the implications for understanding present-day linguistic diversity? The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson argue in their paper in Frontiers in Language Sciences that modern language and speech can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago.
I'm always uncomfortable with these distinctions of various ancient humans as "species." We already know at HNS and HSS interbred as did HNS and the Denisovans. That would seem to throw a monkey wrench into the more strict definition of "species" to begin with.
