[NetBehaviour] Neanderthals speak out after 30,000 years.

[marc garrett]

Neanderthals speak out after 30,000 years.

NewScientist.com - Ewen Callaway.

Talk about a long silence – no one has heard their voices for 30,000 
years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up – or at least a 
computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf.

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.

Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal 
tracts understand one another, says McCarthy, who was talking at the 
annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists 
in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11.

more...
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn13672