Neanderthals may have been speakers too

Every time I stand in front of a room, I am using something staggeringly old. The human voice, and the urge to shape it into words that move other people, reaches back further than any of us can properly picture. And here is a discovery that pushes it back further still: our cousins, the Neanderthals, may well have been speakers too.

A DNA analysis has shown that Neanderthals carried the same changes to the so-called FOXP2 gene as modern humans, homo sapiens. That gene plays a decisive role in the ability to speak. Since anthropologists had already argued that Neanderthals shared certain anatomical features with homo sapiens that would create the conditions for speech, the odds have now risen that they really could express themselves in words.

Earlier research has also given us reason to believe that Neanderthals could make tools, clothed themselves in animal hides, and took good care of one another.

They lived across parts of what is now Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East for perhaps 170,000 years. Most researchers have leaned towards the view that they survived in Europe right up until the arrival of modern humans around 30,000 years ago. According to contested findings published last year, they may have held on until as recently as 24,000 years ago, which would mean they lived alongside homo sapiens for thousands of years.

This new discovery of the Neanderthals' genetic kinship with us was made by a team led by the biochemist Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, who published their findings in the journal Current Biology. In their study, the researchers managed to extract DNA from a set of Neanderthal remains uncovered during excavations in northern Spain. Because the bones were so well preserved, they were able to recover nuclear DNA, that is, DNA from the cell nuclei, where almost all of the genetic information we carry is gathered.

It is a humbling thought. The next time you feel nervous before you speak, remember that the impulse to stand up and put feeling into words may be one of the oldest and most human things there is, older, perhaps, than our own species.