_Robert McCarthy_: What I and my colleagues did is to try to predict where the voice box, where the hyroid bone and tongue would have been positioned in the throats of Neanderthals and other fossil hominids.

A computer synthesizer imagined how the Neanderthal “E” would have sounded: ” “:http://208.96.63.114/files/n1.mp3

Compare that to our human “E”: ” “:http://208.96.63.114/files/s4.mp3

That “E” is the difference between saying “bit” and “beat.” Neanderthals wouldn’t have been able to voice that distinction, meaning their speech was likely less expressive than ours.

_Robert McCarthy_: It might have been a little bit slower, it might have been a little bit more difficult to perceive, in the sense that there might have been more errors. But I think that they could have had a very complex spoken language._

McCarthy hopes to simulate an entire sentence of Neanderthal speech. Although they were way before Shakespeare’s time, he would like to have the Neanderthals quote Hamlet: “What a piece of work is man.”

Written by Lindsay Patterson