We know our ancestors cosied up to our Neanderthal cousins, but did their liaisons leave an imprint on today's languages?
IF YOU find yourself stuttering your way through tourist French, spare a thought for the first modern humans. Travelling from Africa to Asia and Europe about 70,000 years ago, they would have encountered their evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, for the first time.
What did they say? In the past, many would have answered "not a lot" since Neanderthals weren't thought to have complex speech. But recent evidence suggests they probably had languages very similar to our own. Surprisingly, we may now have the means to glimpse those utterances in the words we speak today, with huge consequences for our understanding of language evolution.
The argument that Neanderthals spoke like us comes from many discoveries. Archaeological remains show that they had a sophisticated lifestyle, with human traits ...
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