Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human’s speech lacked the “quantal vowel” sounds that underlie modern speech.
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The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT. …
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German researchers have discovered Neandertals apparently had the human variant of a gene that is linked to speech and language. A team of scientists, primarily from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the discovery during efforts to reconstruct a full genome of the extinct hominid. …
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An extraordinary advance in human origins research reveals evidence of the emergence of the upright human body plan over 15 million years earlier than most experts have believed. More dramatically, the study confirms preliminary evidence that many early hominoid apes were most likely upright bipedal walkers sharing the basic body form of modern humans. …
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When it comes to the FOXP2 gene, humans have had most to shout about. Discoveries that mutations in this gene lead to speech defects and that the gene underwent changes around the time language evolved both implicate FOXP2 in the evolution of human language. … A new study, undertaken by a joint of team of British and Chinese scientists, has found that this gene shows unparalleled variation in echolocating bats. …
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Neanderthals likely did not possess the cognitive complexities of modern humans and, as a result, probably did not suffer from schizophrenia and certain other mental disorders, according to a new theory. The theory proposes that language, creativity and many mental diseases are linked, due to the fact that they may originate in the neocortex, as well as the densely cell-packed cortex, located towards the top of the brain. These brain regions appear to mature and develop more slowly than other areas. …
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In research published on Monday, scientists seeking clues to the origins of human language analyzed the way two types of apes genetically closely related to people — chimpanzees and bonobos — use such hand and limb gestures to communicate. They found that the apes use such gestures much more flexibly — in different contexts with apparently different meanings — than they used facial expressions and vocalizations. The findings, they believe, lend support to the idea that human language started with such gestures rather than speech. …
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It is time to stop thinking we are the pinnacle of evolutionary success – chimpanzees are the more highly evolved species, according to new research. …
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Research in Brazil has produced fresh evidence that primates may have something approaching human “culture”. …
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They may look like toys, but these robots have helped to back one theory of the origins of language. …
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Three girls who were imprisoned by their mother in a house of indescribable filth for seven years may never recover from the ordeal, experts said last night. The girls were shut away from the outside world, existing in almost complete darkness, playing only with mice and communicating in their own language. …
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The human brain underwent explosive growth after we split from our chimp cousins, but the pace of evolutionary change among the thousands of genes expressed in brain tissue has since slowed, says a new study in PLOS Biology. The researchers involved speculate that the higher complexity of the biochemical network in the brain places strong constraints on the ability of most brain-related genes to change. …
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Approximately 6 percent of human and chimp genes are unique to those species, report scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and three other institutions. The new estimate, reported in the inaugural issue of Public Library of Science ONE (Dec. 2006), takes into account something other measures of genetic difference do not — the genes that aren’t there.
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A startling archaeological discovery this summer changes our understanding of human history. While, up until now, scholars have largely held that man’s first rituals were carried out over 40, 000 years ago in Europe, it now appears that they were wrong about both the time and place. Associate Professor Sheila Coulson, from the University of Oslo, can now show that modern humans, Homo sapiens, have performed advanced rituals in Africa for 70,000 years. She has, in other words, discovered mankind’s oldest known ritual. …
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What are the genetic changes that set us apart from our Neanderthal cousins? Although the ancient race is long extinct, we may soon know the answers. More than one million base pairs of fossilised Neanderthal DNA have now been sequenced – the most of any extinct organism – thanks to a new high-throughput sequencing technique well-suited to handling old, degraded DNA.
Read the full article at New Scientist Tech
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