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Razib points me to this press release announcing a study estimating Neandertal intelligence by way of their stone tool set. The press is running wild with this news. The Independent put out a piece on it. So has the Guardian. Even the BBC has got something to say about it. And the story has made it to front pages of Slashdot, Digg, and Wired. Unfortunately, the research paper has not yet been published, but it will be appearing in the Journal of Human Evolution under this title, “Are Upper Paleolithic blade cores more productive than Middle Paleolithic discoidal cores? A replication experiment.”

In lieu of the primary source, I have extracted some information from the news I’ve read. The lead author of the paper is Metin Eren. He and the archaeologists on his team did some experimental archaeology. In other words, they recreated the Neandertal tool set as well as the more modern human tool set. The summary that Brandon Keim, of Wired, provided is rather misleading. Keim says that they analyzed tools used by Neandertals — not really. From what I can tell, Eren and crew made some wide flakes (from discoidal cores) that resembled Neandertal and human tools from the Middle Paleolithic tools and compared them to more specialized narrow blades made by modern humans, from the Upper Paleolithic, who came from a more recent expansion out of Africa.

Flakes were made by archaic Homo somewhere around 250,000 years ago. It involved taking rock like flint and subjecting it to percussion flaking. This created fragments where one side resembles a bi-convex, shell-like shape. Another heavy percussion blow to the bottom of the piece resulted in a convex lens-like shape. This methodology, often called the Levallois technique, was perfected by Neandertals into what is now known as the Mousterian culture.

Aside from being narrow, blades are more or less parallel flakes of brittle rock, like flint, chert and obsidian. They are most often twice as long as wide and the cross section of a blade is triangular or trapezoidal. Blades functioned in many different tools from knives to scrapers, spear tips, drills, awls, bruins, etc.

The authors next measured circumference of these stone tools using a method developed by Adobe and Think Computer corporations. With this, they were able to calculate how much cutting-edge was created and estimate the production efficiency as well as the life time of the tool. Their results indicate that there was no technical advantage to blades from the Upper Paleolithic. And, they conclude that Homo sapiens were not more advanced than Neandertals. Eren comments, saying,

“It’s not a better technology, it’s just a different technology.”

This is not a very surprising result. And I agree with Eren that we need to stop thinking Neandertals as clumbering cavemen. Razib has already outlined some of the basic facts, i.e. Neandertals had big brains and other conquest during human history were not won by ‘great technological imbalances.’ In 1997, people recovered mammalian DNA from the surfaces of Neandertal stone tools, which showed they were able to take down large game like rhinos and mammoths. Clearly, a sign of an intelligent being.

All this ‘let’s rethink Neandertals as intelligent beings’ reminds me of February’s isotopic study on a Neandertal tooth. There was so much press buzzing around, stating that, “Ohhh new fancy research shows Neandertals were mobile.” When in fact, any logical person would have never questioned Neandertal mobility.

One last point. This study challenges the notion that modern Homo sapiens technology gave them an evolutionary upper hand — a better tool set of narrow blades helped modern humans outcompete Neandertals in hunting of big game, and thus survived more effectively. Though Neandertals had different tools, this analysis showed that their tools didn’t have much of a difference in cutting effectiveness and were just as costly as Upper Paleolithic blades. While I haven’t had a chance to read the original paper — it isn’t online yet — I wonder if the authors discuss the differences in the applications of blades versus flakes? Both may have been just as effective in cutting surface but blades functioned as more diverse compound tools, i.e. they could be interchanged between harpoons and spears, knives and scrapers. A compound tool’s advantage over less versatile Mousterian tools, is that they can be repaired — costing the toolmaker and culture less resources spent in fashioning new tools.

And if you want to see the data that Eren and team produced, you know to do your own number crunching, they’ve made it available on Think Computer corp’s website.

Michelle Glantz, Sheela Athreya, and Terrence Ritzman have taken up yet another a reassessment of Teshik-Tash Neandertal child in the latest issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. They’ve published the paper under the title, “Is Central Asia the Eastern Outpost of the Neandertal Range? A Reassessment of the Teshik-Tash Child.”

The child, Teshik-Tash 1, was found in 1938 in Uzbekistan. There’s been a lot of back and forth since the original publication on whether or not Teshik-Tash is really a Neandertal. I won’t be reviewing all the literature since the authors do a good job covering the discussion. The authors argue that one of the main reasons why Teshik-Tash is still considered a Neandertal is because of historical precedence. They also argue that this precedence has prevented people from fully appreciating variation.

They’ve found several things in the literature that may have affected its assessment, such as a reconstruction of the cranium. They claim that distortions and missing elements may have affected the morphology of the sample. For example, missing pieces of the fossil at the base of the cranium are parts that would affect the shape and size of the foramen magnum — a trait that has been used to attribute the Teshik-Tash child as a Neandertal. I’ve taken the liberty of highling an image, provided by the authors, to better illustrate the missing pieces.

Missing Parts of the Teshik-Tash Neandertal

But because of the not measuring reconstructions, there’s a lot of missing data. To compensate, expectation-maximization algorithms, a type of maximum likelihood estimations were deployed as well as  multiple imputation, a technique for fitting models to incomplete data sets. Ultimately the data was analyzed under a principle component analysis and multinomial logistic regression. These statistical procedures are more fitting for small sample sizes with missing data.

The results suggest that Teshik-Tash share a lot of cranial and mandibular similarities to Upper Paleolithic modern humans, and fail to support the suggestion that Teshik-Tash is like its European Neandertal sub-adult comrades. But there really aren’t any other Central Asian Neandertal subadults to say for sure that this guy ain’t Neandertal. Until more specimens are found from that region, its really hard to say that the morphology swings either way.

Glantz et al. give about one sentence to the results of Krause et al.’s mtDNA analysis of Teshik-Tash from last year. A shame they play down the results. The results, which I covered, conclude that 190 base pairs from the Teshik Tash kid’s mtDNA is very similar to other Neandertals. The seqeunce can be found under this Genbank entry. I’ve decided to do a quick phylogenetic comparison of these 190bp to modern humans and other Neandertals. Here are the results, which clearly show Teshik-Tash, in these 190bp, is definitely Neandertal (the Teshik-Tash individual is the yellow, unknown item in the tree, and click thru to see a larger image):

Comparison of Teshik-Tash mtDNA to Other Humans & Neandertals

I’m not saying the DNA analysis is definitive. If more DNA could be sequenced from the mitochondrion of Teshik-Tash, that would be better. But given that ancient DNA is fickle, what we have is pretty damn convincing. Despite the argument for distortion, previous morphological analysis (studies that didn’t rely on compensating for missing data) also support the claim that Teshik-Tash is a Neandertal. With these two lines of evidence, why then are we beating this dying horse?

Glantz, M., Athreya, S., Ritzman, T. (2008). Is Central Asia the eastern outpost of the Neandertal range? A reassessment of the Teshik-Tash child. American Journal of Physical Anthropology DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20897

Tomorrow’s issue of the high impact & widly cited journal Cell hosts this paper, “A Complete Neandertal Mitochondrial Genome Sequence Determined by High-Throughput Sequencing (DOI:10.1016/j.cell.2008.06.021)” First author, Richard Green, says that this genome is essentially without error. The genome comes from the Vindija 33.16 specimen, a 38,000 year old Neandertal from Croatia, of which around 0.3 grams of bone was extracted and mtDNA isolated.

Vindija Cave, Croatia

Serre et. al. sequenced the HVR1 region of the mtDNA of the Vindija 33.16 sample in 2004, and Richard Green et al. sequenced 2414 bp of mtDNA sequence from this sample in the famous 2006 paper, “Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA.” Like the 2006 paper, 454 sequencing was used in the current paper because it doesn’t rely on cloning, and yet provides 34.9 fold coverage.

I won’t get into the nitty gritty details of the sequencing protocol, but here’s some of the conclusions of the mitochondrial genome analysis. Comparing the assembled 16,565 base pair Neandertal mtDNA sequence to the 16,568 base pair Cambridge reference mtDNA sequence (rCRS) showed that there are 206 differences, of which 195 are transitions and 11 are transversions).

To assess the evolutionary relationship between modern humans and this Neandertal, the authors compared this Neandertal mitochondrial genome to 53 different mtDNAs of extant humans as well as a bonobo and chimpanzee. They estimated the divergence time of the Neandertal mitochondrial genome by using the 6-8 million year old divergence time of chimpanzees. They estimate a 660,000 year old divergence time between humans and Neandertals, with a 95% credibility interval of 520,000–800,000 years ago.

COX2 Protein Sequence Differences between Neandertal and Modern Humans in Structural Context

The subunit 2 of cytochrome c oxidase (COX2), an enzyme that functions in the electron transport chain, of modern humans exhibits four amino acid substitutions compared to the Neandertals. While the authors don’t know the implications of these subsitutions, they do consider this interesting,

“…because mtDNA is inherited without recombination, and because the Neandertal mtDNA falls outside the variation of modern human mtDNA, this single modern human observation represents a reversion to the ancestral state seen in Neandertals and chimpanzees. Thus, these four amino acid substitutions occurred in the relatively short period after the divergence of Neandertal and extant human mtDNAs and before the most recent common ancestor of current human mtDNAs. The observation of four nonsynonymous substitutions on the modern human lineage, and no amino acid changes on the Neandertal lineage, stands in contrast to the overall trend of more nonsynonymous evolution in Neandertal protein-coding genes, and deserves consideration.”

How does Green know that the genome is without error? In other words, how do we know contamination ain’t an issue? 454 sequencing generates,

“a high average coverage of the random sequence reads in combination with amplification and sequencing of positions where coverage is low, or where longer nucleotide homopolymers may cause base calling problems, make us confident that the error rates from both these sources are low.”

The authors estimate at most, modern DNA contamination is 0.5%.

I’d be really interested to see the sequences of Neandertals prior to the last Ice Age, when population sizes were relatively larger and the genetic diversity would be larger. DNA from Neandertals that were around 110,000 years ago would be great, because, what we have now, is from few individuals that were around glaciation would affect the observed mutations. Some of you may point me 2006 Current Biology paper by Orlando et al. where the authors were able retrieve 123 bp of the mtDNA HVR-1 from the molar of a 10-12 year-old Neandertal child from Scladina cave, Belgium… but that’s a very short region piece of DNA from an individual well inside the glaciation period… But I don’t know of any 110,000 year old Neandertal specimens off the top of my head.

Rachel Mackelprang and Edward Rubin have written up a short review of current state of paleo-DNA in today’s issue of Science. They pay particular attention to the Neandertal sequencing project and the recent research, such as the melanocortin 1 receptor (Mc1r) and forkhead box P2 (Foxp2) studies we read about last fall. They also outline some of the challenges facing extracting, amplifying, and sequencing ancient DNA, as well as future prospects.

Mackelprang, R., Rubin, E.M. (2008). PALEONTOLOGY: New Tricks with Old Bones. Science, 321(5886), 211-212. DOI: 10.1126/science.1161890

News of Neandertal tools from an Early Upper Palaeolithic site called Beedings, north east of Pulborough in West Sussex, United Kingdom is emerging. So far the BBC News is the only major news source running this, but smaller local news papers such as the West Sussex Gazette have also published news on this subject.

Team leader Matthew Pope of Archaeology South East has restarted excavations at the Beedings site. Beedings was first excavated in 1900, over one hundred years ago. Then, over 2,300 stone tools were uncovered as foundations were being dug for what is now the Beedings Castle (which is apparently for sale). Last year Roger Jacobi of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project published an analysis of these tools in a paper titled, “A Collection of Early Upper Palaeolithic Artefacts from Beedings, near Pulborough, West Sussex.” From what I can tell, the publishing journal, unfortunately, doesn’t have a working system for people to access the article.

Jacobi understood the tools showed strong resemblances to other tools from northern Europe dating to between 35,000 and 42,000 years ago, putting this site right in the Late Paleolithic. This meant either an early colonization date of Britain by anatomically modern humans or an occupation by technologically advanced and late surviving Neandertals.

The diversity and type of the tools from Beedings is more extensive than any other found in the region. They are mostly all long refined blades or cores where these blades were knapped from. Such tools come from technologically advanced cultures, with an understanding of where to find the raw material, and how to finely knap them.

Because of this advanced tool kit, Pope considers the Neandertals of this area were thriving and far from struggling to survive — which has been proposed by many as one of the reasons why Neandertals went bye-bye. Pope comments,

“Unlike earlier, more typical Neandertal tools these were made with long, straight blades – blades which were then turned into a variety of bone and hide processing implements, as well as lethal spear points…

…We also discovered older, more typical Neanderthal tools, deeper in the fissure. Clearly, Neanderthal hunters were drawn to the hill over a long period time…

The impression they give is of a population in complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials with a flourishing technology – not a people on the edge of extinction.”

Barney Sloane, Head of Historic Environment Commissions at English Heritage added, supporting Pope and Jacobi,

“The tools at Beedings could equally be the signature of pioneer populations of modern humans, or traces of the last Neanderthal hunting groups to occupy the region.

This study offers a rare chance to answer some crucial questions about just how technologically advanced Neanderthals were, and how they compare with our own species.”

How does Pope know for sure that these tools are made by Neandertals? We know there were probably eight major incursions into Britain by humans, and the British people of today are essentially new arrivals – products only of the last influx 12,000 years, indicating the other seven migrations failed… In other words those inhabitants went bye-bye too. Stone tools from a quarry at Lynford, near Norwich indicate Neandertals occupied Britain some 60,000 years ago.

So the hype spun by Pope, and the BBC, you know the enthusiasm that the tools from Beddings prove Neandertals were sophisticated and in ‘ complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials,’ isn’t entirely novel. Neandertals had to be in command of the landscape and materials to cross either the North Sea or the English Channel from mainland Europe and enter Britan. Furthermore they had to have been in command of fashioning functional tools to take down large mammals, like mammoths and woolly rhinoceros — two prey species associated with Neandertal sites in the United Kingdom, which they survived off of for thousands of years.

This reminds me of this other hyped up Neandertal finding which I wrote about in February. Then, the press was going crazy over how some isotope analysis (creative methodology but not a very enlightening result) proved Neandertals were mobile. Again, hardly a novel concept… but I’m wondering why everyone still considers Neandertals as clueless cavemen? We’re far past that understanding. We know their tool set has been ‘advanced,’ they migrated all over Eurasia and the Middle East and had bodies and brains much like ours — if not larger. Given the wealth of archaeological and morphological evidence, it is time to stop spinning this pop-culture representation of Neandertals as dumb bipedal apes.

One last thing, you maybe interested in this 2 minute news video where Matthew Pope simply explains hypes up the tools to the BBC News.

An new article in press, to be published in the Journal of Human Evolution will announce new hominin remains from Uzbekistan. The remains were actually found five years ago, and are the first hominin findings from the country in over 65 years! The remains were discovered in two Middle Paleolithic sites, the Obi-Rakhmat Grotto and Anghilak Cave. From the abstract,

“The material from Obi-Rakhmat (OR-1), a subadult represented by part of a permanent maxillary dentition and a fragmentary cranium, expresses a relatively Neandertal-like dentition coupled with more ambiguous cranial anatomy. The remains from Anghilak Cave include a non-diagnostic, diminutive right fifth metatarsal (AH-1). These findings are important additions to the Central Asia hominin fossil record.”

The paper, “New hominin remains from Uzbekistan,” is pretty straightforward. Obi-Rakhmat Grotto sits just west of the Kyrgyzstan border. It is a very rich in archaeology… lots of elongated Levallois blade blanks have been recovered. There is also a large zooarchaeological record, which shows taphonomic modification by humans, i.e. cut-marks, burning, etc.

Obi-Rakhmat deposits have been dated with AMS radiocarbon dating of charcoal, U-series dating of travertines, and electron spin resonance (ESR) on ungulate teeth. The radiocarbon dates exceeded the limits of the method, the U-series suggests the deposits are anywhere from 70,000–100,000 years old. ESR from the top strata date to 57,000–73,000 years old, while the bottom strata is dated to be 87,000 years old. The human remains from Obi-Rakhmat are represented by 6 isolated permanent maxillary teeth and over 120 crania fragments. Here are photos of the human remains from Ob-Rakhmat:

Obi-Rakhmat has been studied for over 45 years, where Anghilak Cave is a more recent discovery. There aren’t as many Levallois debitage in Anghilak as Obi-Rakhmat. According to the authors, the archaeology of Anghilak appears to be analogous to those of Kunji Cave, Iran (a Paleolithic site with small retouched tools). Preliminary radiocarbon dates from Anghilak suggest it is somewhere between 43,900-38,100 years old. Only one human remain was recovered from Anghilak, a metatarsal picture below:

The Obi-Rakhmat remains are thought to be single child, aged 9-12 years old, represented by the specimen name OR-1. The morphology of OR-1 dentition suggest this kid was a Neandertal. The first molar exhibits a skewed occlusal surface, the premolars exhibit some Neandertal traits. The cranial fragments, such as the relatively thick parietal of OR-1 further suggest that it was a Neandertal. Some other cranial fragments, such as the presence of a foramen in the parietal are seen in at least 37% of modern human. Neandertals, such as Amud 1, Shanidar 1, Tabun 1, Skhul 4, 5, and 9 lack such a foramen.

Making inferences from the temporal fragments of OR-1, the authors suggest that the external acoustic meatus of OR-1 is much lower, a trait seen in modern humans as well… but looking at the morphology of the inner ear, OR-1 has a small and wide posterior semicircular canal, a trait seen in Neandertals. The metatarsal from Anghilak, AH-1, isn’t representative enough to determine a species nor age — all we can tell is that it is human.

In general this description of the remains sound a lot like Teshik-Tash. The hominin remains from Teshik-Tash, the only other site in Uzbekistan yielding hominin fossils, are just as fragmentary and mixed in traits as OR-1. A recent genetic study of the Teshik-Tash remains suggest it was Neandertal, and I’m thinking that OR-1 and AH-1, if excavated under sterile conditions, may also need genetic analysis to confirm.

GLANTZ, M., VIOLA, B., WRINN, P., CHIKISHEVA, T., DEREVIANKO, A., KRIVOSHAPKIN, A., ISLAMOV, U., SULEIMANOV, R., RITZMAN, T. (2008). New hominin remains from Uzbekistan. Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2007.12.007

Got to hand it to Blaine Bettinger, of the Genetic Genealogist, for catching this news on GenomeWeb Daily New. In a nutshell, it is a report of what Svante Pääbo‘s talked about at the Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Pääbo, if you don’t know, is one of the main researchers behind sequencing the Neandertal genome. He’s spent a lot of his life perfecting the recovering and sequencing of ancient DNA, from Egyptian mummies to ice-age bears.

In late 2006, he was a co-author of a paper reporting that he and his team have sequenced 1 million bases of the Neandertal genome. The paper, “Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA,” was generally well received. But a PLoS Genetics paper titled, “Inconsistencies in Neanderthal Genomic DNA Sequences,” found a lot of problems with results and raised concerns that a lot of the issues are possibly due to modern human DNA contaminants and/or a high rate of sequencing errors. Pääbo has looked into this and in his talk,

“mentioned that about 10 percent of the DNA library they initially sequenced consisted of modern human DNA. But over the last two years, they have been guarding against contamination by generating DNA libraries in a clean room and by barcoding the Neandertal DNA.”

He and his team have also been able to sequence the complete Neandertal mitochondrial genome. They didn’t do this just one time. They did it 35 times, which not only increases the accuracy of the sequence by conferring it many more times, but also weeds out the possibility contamination exists. This has been possible because Pääbo has utilized pyrosequencing, a newish method developed by 454 Life Sciences. Pyrosequencing can handle several contiguous sites in parallel, whereas traditional chain termination methods can’t.

The completed mitochondrial genome of the Neandertal is approximately 16 kilobases long and differs from the Cambridge Reference Sequence of the modern human mitochondrial genome at 133 positions. Blaine has tried to seek out the actual sequence, but with little luck. I hope that they will soon put up the sequence on GenBank for us to play around with!

In brief, Science has published three news pieces that you maybe interested. They are all reports of what was presented at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting a couple weeks ago. The first, “Snapshots From the Meeting,” is a summary of the conference, where Ann Gibbons and Elizabeth Colutta discuss, ‘the evolution of gliding, the divergence of Homo habilis and H. erectus, and Neandertal speech.’ The last topic is something I covered, so you may wanna read a more professional overview.

On that note, you may also wanna check out, “Australopithecus Not Much of a Nutcracker,” which is directly related to research on Paranthropus boisei‘s diet I reported on a couple days ago. The piece is a bit more thorough though, providing a summary of the,

“different analytical methods suggest that robust australopithecines didn’t eat hard nuts and seeds routinely as had been thought, and that robust and gracile hominids actually ate similar fare.”

Last but definitely not least is an interesting news piece on the paleohistory of tuberculosis. In the news report, Ann Gibbons discusses how DNA, coming from early humans were infected with strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, prior to the emergence of pastoralism. This suggests that humans were the primary vector that transmitted the disease to bovids and other animals and not vice versa. This kinda shakes up the hypothesis that Razib has been thinking about — that importance of vitamin D was selected as an important immune system component after the Neolithic revolution, when humans began to be pastoralists and agriculturalists.

All three news pieces are short and sweet, a total of three pages long. Check’em out.

Gibbons, A. (2008). AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS MEETING: Tuberculosis Jumped From Humans to Cows, Not Vice Versa. Science, 320(5876), 608a-608a. DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5876.608a

Gibbons, A. (2008). AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS MEETING: Australopithecus Not Much of a Nutcracker. Science, 320(5876), 608b-609b. DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5876.608b

Gibbons, A., Culotta, E. (2008). AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS MEETING: Snapshots From the Meeting. Science, 320(5876), 609-609. DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5876.609

Last month’s annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society hosted a talk by Amanda Henry, a graduate student at George Washington University. She analyzed the microfossils of plant material found in the dental plaque on Neandertal teeth from Shanidar, Iraq.

What is dental plaque? Much to the chargin of dentists out there, the composition and origin of dental plaque isn’t known to most. We may know it simply as something we work so diligently every morning and evening to brush away. Plaques are a type of biofilm. Bioflims are an amalgamation of microorganisms, who excrete a goo to protect themselves and allow them to stick together. Inside this gooey microecosystem, these crafty microorganisms also trap food particles to use as energy sources for themselves. If left untreated on teeth, these plagues of microorganisms grow and the amount of anaerobic respiration increases reciprocally. One of the byproducts of anaerobic respiration are acids which consequently demineralize adjacent tooth surface, and form cavities. That’s why you should brush and floss twice a day.

In September of last year, I shared news of how Neandertals may have also been aware of their dental hygiene. We saw how they may have used toothpicks. But, they didn’t have Sonicare toothbrushes and dental hygenists scraping away plaques every six months. Inevitably, some plaques persisted and in the teeth of a 35,000 year old Neandertal (Shanidar III). Amanda Henry was able to recover plant material. Henry gets into a discussion on how this showed evidence that Neandertals ate plants.

Not too novel, but definitely important to finally confirm. Much like the conclusion that Neandertals were mobile, plant consumption among them is one of those things we knew was most likely the case. How? Based upon the dental anatomy and morphology of the teeth, we knew they had very robust molars to grind down plant materials. Comparison to extant apes, like chimpanzees and humans, confers that Neandertals may have also been omnivorous. Furthermore, the results of a 2006 Science paper, an isotopic analysis of hominid teeth revealed that hominids ate a variety of foods.

I was gonna get into a discussion on how this one finding doesn’t mean all Neandertals died without brushing after a nice yummy salad meal. Nor does it elucidate how many times this Shanny-3 ate his greens. But, Henry acknowledges that and cautions that Shanidar III is only one fossil and does not provide enough evidence to make conclusive statements about the entirety of the Neandertal diet. I commend her on that. Even with this disclaimer, Matt Sponheimer, lead author of the 2006 isotopic analysis still wanted to have the last word, rehashing that,

“…[this study] does not indicate whether an individual Neandertal ate plants once or a thousand times.

It also doesn’t show the relative proportions of a food type in the individual’s diet.

“Thus it is but one flawed technique of paleodietary reconstruction among many,” he said.”

While we consider Matt’s critiques, let’s also consider one I thought of — The most simple explanation of the presence of plant material in plaques on the teeth means that this Neandertal chewed plants. Without an isotopic comparison of the recovered plant material to Shanidar 3′s teeth, we don’t know if this guy was really digesting the plant. Maybe Amanda Henry is looking into that…

One last thing, if Shanidar 3 really was eating plants, did his foot injury have anything to do with this? See, Shanidar III has a degenerative joint disorder in his foot. That woulda caused a lot of pain and limited his mobility. Would that have anything to do with why he was chewing on sedentary food sources?

Trinkaus, E. (1982). The Shanidar 3 Neandertal. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 57(1), 37-60. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330570107

Sponheimer, M., Passey, B.H., de Ruiter, D.J., Guatelli-Steinberg, D., Cerling, T.E., Lee-Thorp, J.A. (2006). Isotopic Evidence for Dietary Variability in the Early Hominin Paranthropus robustus. Science, 314(5801), 980-982. DOI: 10.1126/science.1133827

While we’re on the subject of Neandertal language capabilities, I want to share with you news from last week’s annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. I wasn’t there, I know a couple people who went but they didn’t tell me about Robert McCarthy‘s research. Robert has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice, and presented his findings.

He’s not the first to have done this. Phil Lieberman estimated the dimensions of the larynx based off of skull sizes of Neandertals in the 1970′s. His work showed that Neandertals did not have a larynx like humans to catch the subtlety of modern human speech. Lieberman worked with McCarthy to simulate Neanderthal speech based on new reconstructions of three Neandertal vocal tracts.

By modeling the sounds the Neanderthal pipes would have made, McCarthy’s team engineered the sound of a Neanderthal saying “E”. He plans to eventually simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence. I’ve uploaded the sound bites for you to listen to and to be really honest, I don’t hear an “E.” I hear a sheep or a goat, but you can try figure out what you hear.

Here’s the human voice:

And here’s the Neandertal voice:

Haha, I’m laughing as I type this. I find the sounds really hilarious, especially because I expected Neandertals to have a really low pitched voice. Neandertals were more robust and larger than modern humans, and in my experience, modern humans that are larger and more robust than average have deep voices on average. So to hear high pitched “E”‘s from this simulation, I find it comical.

Anyways, for the linguists out there, McCarthy, explained that the difference in vocalizations was because Neandertal cranio-facial anatomy lacked the ability to produce “quantal vowel” sounds that underlie modern speech. Quantal vowels are necessary in providing audible cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another.

Like I said, I don’t know exactly how McCarthy reconstructed these vocalizations. Since Lieberman collaborated with McCarthy, I expect that he did similar work. Furthermore, since only fossils of Neandertals remain, McCarthy had to compare and contrast the anatomical similarities and differences of humans and Neandertals to the vocalization. Is that the right way to do this?

Well, in 1999, David DeGusta and crew slammed Kay et al. for concluding Neandertal’s hyoid morphology indicated they were capable of modern language in, “Hypoglossal canal size and hominid speech.” So, I’m a bit skeptical.