Evidence for Neanderthal (and other early human) language?

[njtt]

It seems to me that I have come across the claim in a number of places , now, that Neanderthal Man probably had language, comparable to modern human language. The only source for this that I can now pinpoint is a talk I heard given by Stephen Mithen in 2003, and presumably it is also in his 2005 book (which I have not read), of which his talk was (I think) a sort of precis. However, I am sure I have come across the claim in other places since, very possibly including these boards. I have an idea it might even be the conventional wisdom in anthropology now (but I may well be wrong about that).

However, although I do not, now, remember what reasons Mithen gave for thinking this in his talk, I do remember thinking at the time that they were very weak arguments for what (seemed to me to be) such a momentous claim. His motivation for making the claim seemed to be that he wanted to argue that the archeological record shows evidence for a significant change in human (homo sapiens) culture about 50,000 years ago, and that that change was what enabled homo sapiens to out compete the Neanderthals, but he also wanted to maintain that this change, and the evolutionary advantage held by sapiens, had nothing to do with the evolution of language. At the time, my thought was that a much more parsimonious explanation would be that it was true language that appeared about 50,000 years ago amongst homo sapiens, and led to the observed cultural change and concomitant competitive advantage, but I am not any sort of expert in this area.

Does anyone know if there is any real evidence (or decent arguments) for thinking that Neanderthals had language? Is it, in fact, now the conventional wisdom amongst experts that they did, or just an eccentric minority view? Come to that, is there any actual evidence that early homo sapiens had language (as opposed to the sorts of signaling systems we see in apes and other animals), or is this just assumed on the grounds that they were the same species as we are?

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Incidentally, in attempting to research some background on these questions, I came across some apparent contradictions in Wikipedia. According to this page, “anatomically modern humans” (Homo sapiens sapiens) “evolved from archaic Homo sapiens in the Middle Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago” (although it then goes on to say that the earliest remains are from c.195,000 years ago - but that is a relatively minor inconsistency). On the other hand, this page says that the earlier subspecies of homo sapiens, Homo sapiens idaltu (idaltu meaning “elder” or “first born”), from which, it is implied, sapiens sapiens evolved, “lived almost 160,000 years ago in Pleistocene Africa”. 160,000, I note, is a good deal less than 200,000. If “archaic Homo sapiens” does not mean Homo sapiens idaltu, but some other subspecies from which sapiens idaltu and sapiens sapiens both evolved, what is this subspecies called and when did it (i.e., the first Homo sapiens), first evolve? I cannot find a clear, non-contradictory answer in Wikipedia, except that it must have been well over 200,000 (or at least over 160,000) years ago.

Can anyone sort out this tangle? (Though not at the expense of my original questions about language, I hope.)

[md2000]

Neanderthals could speak like modern humans, study suggests

say:

An analysis of a Neanderthal’s fossilised hyoid bone - a horseshoe-shaped structure in the neck - suggests the species had the ability to speak.

This has been suspected since the 1989 discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid that looks just like a modern human’s.

But now computer modelling of how it works has shown this bone was also used in a very similar way

the closest we can come to saying they could speak, is that they had the anatomy to do so.

[engineer_comp_geek]

They had the anatomy to do so, and they also did things that would have been fairly difficult to do without language. They had a complex culture that included making jewelry, art, and complex tools, and burying their dead. Passing that culture and knowledge from one generation to the next would be very difficult without language.

They also hunted in groups to take down large animals. Coordinating that type of hunting would be difficult without some form of spoken language.

Another thing. If you look at neanderthals vs. homo sapiens at the time, the differences aren’t as dramatic as people used to think. Homo sapiens and neanderthals both made art and tools, but homo sapiens art and tools were just a bit more complex and sophisticated. Homo sapiens and neanderthals both buried their dead, so both had complex cultures. that’s not exactly proof, but if neanderthals didn’t lag that far behind in those kinds of things, the probably didn’t lag that far behind in language either.

[DSeid]

The hyoid anatomy is potentially less the critical bit anyway - brain anatomy is. And they seem to have had the brain regions associated with language, even if the language was primarily gestural.

One theory about language evolution is not so much that making complex (specifically composite) tools is so hard without language, but that the sorts of processing required to do, learn, and teach one is the same sort of processing required to have a more complex language … and to work in more complex social structures with greater planning and specialization. Hence they all tend to co-evolve with the vocal apparatus co-opting circuitry initially more involved with tool-making.

See also here.

The Neandertals had a complex stone tool technology (the Mousterian) that required considerable skill and training, with many variants and elaborations (see Klein, 2009: 485ff). They sometimes mined the raw materials at up to 2 meters depth (Verri et al., 2004). Their stone tools show wear indicating usage on wood, suggesting the existence of a wooden material culture with poor preservation, such as the carefully shaped javelins made ~400 kya from Germany (Thieme, 1997). Tools were hafted with pitch extracted by fire (Roebroeks and Villa, 2011). Complex tool making of the Mousterian kind involves hierarchical planning with recursive sub-stages (Stout, 2011) which activates Broca’s area just as in analogous linguistic tasks (Stout and Chaminade, 2012). The chain of fifty or so actions and the motor control required to master it are not dissimilar to the complex cognition and motor control involved in language (and similarly takes months of learning to replicate by modern students)8. …

[njtt]

@engineer_comp_geek

They also hunted in groups to take down large animals. Coordinating that type of hunting would be difficult without some form of spoken language.

Wolves seem to mange to do that, and lions. Also killer whales.

I am less than convinced that Neanderthals could not have managed to figure out how to make tools without language (chimps and crows do, in rudimentary ways), and then passed the knowledge of tool making on from one generation to the next through showing rather than telling.

The stuff DSeid quotes about Broca’s area is interesting, but it seems to me it could be read as suggesting that a neural structure initially evolved to support tool making might have provided the basis for the subsequent evolution of language, rather than language coming first (or at the same time).

[Colibri]

It was initially reported that Neanderthals had the same version of a gene associated with language that modern humans do, and that this indicated they had similar linguistic capabilities. However, more recent evidence suggests it was regulated differently.

From here.

In 2011, Pääbo reported that the modern human and Neanderthal FOXP2 genes were identical. This led to excited speculation that Neanderthals could probably speak as we do. But last year researchers discovered differences in the way the AMH and Neanderthal FOXP2 genes are regulated. The protein-coding sequences may be the same, but they are controlled in different ways.

[DSeid]

njtt,

Making rudmentary tools, the sort that crows and chimps make, are very different cognitive processes than making composite tools.

But indeed spoken language may have come later. It seems like the rational progression would have been tool making, to composite tool making and gestural language co-evolving with spoken language being added on and to some degree taking over. Gestural comunication is integral in teaching and learning tool-making techniques … see this article about action-observation/action-execution, mirror neurons, Broca’s area, and the origin of language.

At first glance it might seem counterintuitive, if not paradoxical, to root the origin of language into a system related to gestures recognition, since language means essentially speech production. It would appear therefore more logical to look for a vocal antecedent. Vocal calls are commonly uttered by nonhuman primates. These vocalizations, however, at difference with human speech, are usually emitted in response to emotionally indexed events, and appear therefore related to instinctual behavior. Furthermore, the anatomical structures responsible of the control of vocal calls emission are represented by the cingulate cortex together with diencephalic and brainstem structures (Jurgens 1987, MacLean 1993). All these considerations could lead one to give up an evolutionary explanation of language (see, however, Pinker and Bloom 1990), and accept the nativist, mentalist definition of language as proposed by Chomsky (1986), who asserts that language capacity cannot be derived from lower species of animals. An alternative solution, however, can be found in the “motor theory of speech perception” proposed by Libermann several years ago (Libermann et al. 1967). According to Libermann’s theory the “objects” of speech perception are not the sounds but the phonetic gestures of the speaker. These gestures are represented in the brain as invariant motor commands. As stressed by Libermann and Mattingly (1985) the phonetic gestures are the “primitives that the mechanisms of speech production translate into actual articulatory movements, and they are also the primitives that the specialized mechanisms of speech perception recover from the signal.” The similarity of this mechanism with mirror neurons is striking: in both cases at the basis of gesture recognition there is an action/perception matching system. The modality is different, acoustic in the case of speech, visual for mirror neurons. Note, however, that language has not to be necessarily and exclusively assigned to the vocal-auditory domain, but can be exhibited also in the brachio-manual visual domain, as in the case of sign language used by deaf people. In fact, deaf signers suffering from left hemisphere lesions show impairments in their visual-gestural language, such as extreme disfluency and almost exclusive use of referential open-class nouns, that are very similar to the impairments that characterize Broca-like aphasics (see Poizner et al. 1984). These data corroborate the notion that the specialization for language of the left hemisphere of humans is independent of language modality.

My proposal is that this specialization resides in gesture recognition. Broca’s region likely became a language area within a process of evolutionary continuity between its homologue precursor area, monkey premotor area F5, which well before language appearance was already endowed with the capacity of recognizing gestures. Mirror neurons are the neuronal basis of this capacity.

Composite tool making is essential grammar and sentence structure to the words of observation, mirroring, and teaching of simple tool making.

[dropzone]

I’ve knapped flint and the many ways to screw it up or hurt yourself, or likely both, are sure inspirations to create a vocabulary where there wasn’t one before. Even more so if you are trying to teach a fumble-fingered kid and he shatters a rock you had to dig up from two meters down.

[John_Mace]

It’s hard to imagine that Neanderthals did not have some sort of language. They made fire, clothes, complex tools and some art. Whether this language was “comparable to modern human language” is something else. Hell, there are lots of anthropologists who will say that H. sapiens, prior to ~ 70k year ago, did not have language “comparable to modern human language”.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@njtt

Incidentally, in attempting to research some background on these questions, I came across some apparent contradictions in Wikipedia. According to this page, “anatomically modern humans” (Homo sapiens sapiens) “evolved from archaic Homo sapiens in the Middle Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago” (although it then goes on to say that the earliest remains are from c.195,000 years ago - but that is a relatively minor inconsistency). On the other hand, this page says that the earlier subspecies of homo sapiens, Homo sapiens idaltu (idaltu meaning “elder” or “first born”), from which, it is implied, sapiens sapiens evolved, “lived almost 160,000 years ago in Pleistocene Africa”. 160,000, I note, is a good deal less than 200,000. If “archaic Homo sapiens” does not mean Homo sapiens idaltu, but some other subspecies from which sapiens idaltu and sapiens sapiens both evolved, what is this subspecies called and when did it (i.e., the first Homo sapiens), first evolve? I cannot find a clear, non-contradictory answer in Wikipedia, except that it must have been well over 200,000 (or at least over 160,000) years ago.

Can anyone sort out this tangle? (Though not at the expense of my original questions about language, I hope.)

I can’t sort it out, not possessing the relevant knowledge, and the claims by wiki may very well be wrong/outdated in at least one of the articles, but wouldn’t the above be compatible with a simple coexistence of both species, i.e. idaltu existing until at least 160,000 years ago, with sapiens sapiens first showing up 200,000 years ago?

[njtt]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

I can’t sort it out, not possessing the relevant knowledge, and the claims by wiki may very well be wrong/outdated in at least one of the articles, but wouldn’t the above be compatible with a simple coexistence of both species, i.e. idaltu existing until at least 160,000 years ago, with sapiens sapiens first showing up 200,000 years ago?

Yes, that is a possible interpretation, and may well be right, but I was trying to find out when H. sapiens whatever is first though to have appeared, and it does not seem to say. It strongly implies that idaltu is an earlier, ancestral form (and no other forms are mentioned but idaltu and sapiens sapiens), but the only date given for idaltu (as “living”) is considerably later than either of the dates given for the emergence of sapiens sapiens from some ancestor of the same broad species.

I am also taking it on trust, but am not entirely confident, given the other inconsistencies, that Wikipedia is right to say that “anatomically modern human” and Homo sapiens sapiens mean the same thing.

[John_Mace]

@njtt

Yes, that is a possible interpretation, and may well be right, but I was trying to find out when H. sapiens whatever is first though to have appeared, and it does not seem to say. It strongly implies that idaltu is an earlier, ancestral form (and no other forms are mentioned but idaltu and sapiens sapiens), but the only date given for idaltu (as “living”) is considerably later than either of the dates given for the emergence of sapiens sapiens from some ancestor of the same broad species.

I am also taking it on trust, but am not entirely confident, given the other inconsistencies, that Wikipedia is right to say that “anatomically modern human” and Homo sapiens sapiens mean the same thing.

H. sapiens is thought to have emerged about 200,000 years ago. The term “anatomically modern human” is generally used for those older specimens that look like us, but don’t seem to have the complex too kit associated with later H. sapiens– more specifically around the time of African Exodus. That exodus happened around 65,000 years ago.

Some paleo-anthropologists use the term H. sapiens sapiens (or fully modern humans) to refer to those populations around the time of that exodus. So, you have “anatomically modern humans” form about 200,000 years ago to about 65,000 years ago. After that, you have “fully modern humans”. What distinguishes the two populations isn’t exactly clear, but some will say it’s the possession of “fully articulate speech”. But all we really know is what we see in the fossil record-- a seeming explosion of art and expansion of the tool kit.

But this isn’t what I’d call the consensus-- rather it’s one line of thinking. I don’t think everyone (or a vast majority) of scientists buy into that dichotomy. But at any rate, the terms “anatomically modern human” and “H. sapiens sapiens” are not the same thing. To the extent they are used, it is to distinguish between the older populations of our species and the newer, with the dividing line somewhere around 65,000 years ago.

Opinion: I’m more of a lumper than a splitter, so my thoughts are that we’ll eventually converge on a consensus that any differences in these populations are cultural and not biological. But that’s just MHO.

[njtt]

@John_Mace

It’s hard to imagine that Neanderthals did not have some sort of language. They made fire, clothes, complex tools and some art. Whether this language was “comparable to modern human language” is something else. Hell, there are lots of anthropologists who will say that H. sapiens, prior to ~ 70k year ago, did not have language “comparable to modern human language”.

Well, yes, that’s fine by me, as I was toying with the notion that the emergence of “true” language might coincide with Mithen’s cultural shift (really the emergence of symbolic, representational artifacts, like pictures and carvings), that he places at c. 50,00 years ago. (His own explanation relies on a lot of bollocks about modularity which I do not buy for a moment, for broader reasons of cognitive theory, which I know something about.)

I admit I do not have a clear criterion to distinguish “true” “modern type” language from “proto-language” of a sort that surely must have once existed. I think there is a plenty sharp enough distinction between what we can do and what chimps and gorillas can do, but presumably that didn’t all happen in a single jump. On the other hand, it does not have to have been a totally smooth transition either (and probably wasn’t), and any “jumps” there were may not have coincided with any clear anatomical changes that would show up in fossils. Mithen does claim to have evidence, from artifacts, of a fairly clear and quick transition, related to how we symbolize and represent things, but (almost perversely, it seems to me) he refuses to link it to developments in language (at least, he did in the talk I heard).

[engineer_comp_geek]

@njtt

Wolves seem to mange to do that, and lions. Also killer whales.

Killer whales have language. They have calls that are similar to all killer whales, and they have other calls that form local “dialects” that are specific to their individual pods.

Lion and wolf communication is admittedly a lot more primitive, so you have a point there.

[John_Mace]

@engineer_comp_geek

Killer whales have language. They have calls that are similar to all killer whales, and they have other calls that form local “dialects” that are specific to their individual pods.

That’s not the same as having “language”. You might find a few scientists who would agree with you, but not many. Certainly not enough, at this point, to call that a factual statement.

[njtt]

@John_Mace

H. sapiens is thought to have emerged about 200,000 years ago. The term “anatomically modern human” is generally used for those older specimens that look like us, but don’t seem to have the complex too kit associated with later H. sapiens– more specifically around the time of African Exodus. That exodus happened around 65,000 years ago.

Some paleo-anthropologists use the term H. sapiens sapiens (or fully modern humans) to refer to those populations around the time of that exodus. So, you have “anatomically modern humans” form about 200,000 years ago to about 65,000 years ago. After that, you have “fully modern humans”. What distinguishes the two populations isn’t exactly clear, but some will say it’s the possession of “fully articulate speech”. But all we really know is what we see in the fossil record-- a seeming explosion of art and expansion of the tool kit.

But this isn’t what I’d call the consensus-- rather it’s one line of thinking. I don’t think everyone (or a vast majority) of scientists buy into that dichotomy. But at any rate, the terms “anatomically modern human” and “H. sapiens sapiens” are not the same thing. To the extent they are used, it is to distinguish between the older populations of our species and the newer, with the dividing line somewhere around 65,000 years ago.

Opinion: I’m more of a lumper than a splitter, so my thoughts are that we’ll eventually converge on a consensus that any differences in these populations are cultural and not biological. But that’s just MHO.

Ahh, thank you. This makes it a lot clearer. I think I am getting my bearings now. It seems Wikipedia really was misleading me badly by equating “anatomically modern humans” with H. sapiens sapiens. I thought something about that didn’t feel quite right, but I didn’t know.

Do you (or anyone) by any chance have a decent and reasonably recent cite (or two) to someone making a good scholarly (but not too impenetrable for a layman) case that “fully articulate speech” emerged in that period about 65,000 years ago? (Mithen had the “explosion” of art happening at 50,000 y.a., but what is 15,000 years between anthropologists? :)) Someone (apart from Mithen) making the case against that, and pushing the origins of “fully articulate speech” back much further (or bringing it forward, come to that, if anyone does) would be interesting, too. [Perhaps I should add that I can probably get my hands on most paywalled journal articles, at a pinch, but in my current situation I am not well placed to get my hands on scholarly books (unless they are available second-hand and very cheap). I suppose I could ask my local public library, but that is likely to be both slow and expensive, if they can help at all.]

[John_Mace]

njtt: Check out this.

[John_Mace]

The wikipedia article on “anatomically modern humans” isn’t too bad, but I can kind of see the confusion. The last 2 paragraphs, though, are correct:

There is considerable debate regarding whether the earliest anatomically modern humans behaved similarly to recent or existing humans. Modern human behaviors characteristic of recent humans includes a language, the capacity for abstract thought and the use of symbolism to express cultural creativity. There are two opposing hypotheses regarding the origins of modern behavior. Some scholars argue that humans achieved anatomical modernity first, around 200,000 years ago. Later, around 50,000 years ago, humans then adopted modern behaviors. This hypothesis is based on the record of fossils and biogenic substances from periods before 50,000 years ago[54][55] and the human artifacts found after 50,000 years ago.[56] Correspondingly, as stated by Paul Mellars, the view distinguishes anatomically modern humans from behaviorally modern humans.[57]

The opposing view is that humans achieved anatomical and behavioral modernity simultaneously.[58] For example, most views argue that humans had evolved a lightly built skeleton.[59] During this transition to anatomical modernity, this could have occurred through increased human cooperation.[60][61] Additionally, this could have occurred through the increased use of technology, traits characteristic of modern behavior.

The term “anatomically modern” is a way of saying “not behaviorally modern”. Looks like us, doesn’t quite act like us.

[clairobscur]

@engineer_comp_geek

They had the anatomy to do so,.

I’m pretty sure that one big argument against Neanderthals having had a spoken language is that they didn’t have, in fact the anatomy to do so.

[md2000]

I assume there’s a progression from immediate “you - go to left side of herd” to almost immediate “when herd runs, you stand and yell over there” to more abstract - “next week I return with the other three and we can try new way - completely surround the herd.”

I guess the question is - what came first, conceptualization or speech? The concept probably has to be there for the speech to reflect it… from “we hunt” to the idea that you can plan tomorrow’s hunt - the two evolve more complex in tandem.

I heard one fellow talking about speech evolution and he suggested that speech evolved too as a means of grooming - it went something like this. It was easier and more productive to gossip than picking fleas. Apes pick fleas to show group hierarchy - the lesser groom the higher up on the totem pole. With gossip a person could “groom” a larger group at once, allowing for much larger herds to establish hierarchy and harmony. And to demonstrate the importance of gossip as a group cohesion tool, what’s the favorite topic of gossip? Number one is “who’s she sleeping with?” and number two is “who’s pissed off whom?”. Both are extremely important and relevant to group dynamics and establishing hierarchy.