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Originally Posted by JohnnyB
This doesn't seem revolutionary to me at all. Neanderthal's wouldn't be capable of fully human speech because they wouldn't have had a human vocal tract capable of all the same sounds as us, but the notion of simpler Neanderthal speech, or a combination of speech and sign language is not alien at all to the linguistic academic community. I think the idea of Neanderthals as nothing but grunting, idiotic man-apes is just a popular image not endorsed by most anthropologists or linguists.
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There is actually a lot of evidence to point to the fact that Neanderthal's were in fact smarter than humans. I see no reason why they wouldn't be capable of full human speech.
I don't think this stuff about neanderthal talking is new at all. I think the bigger point of the paper was the fact they were able to extract such well preserved DNA and then link it to behavior. There seems to be a constant resistance to the fact neanderthals were intelligent. They've already found hyoid bones and other evidence but people refuse to recognize it. I am also a science nerd