The capacity for language
Anatomy and genetics both suggest speech was possible long before there is any way to prove it.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 271 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 100 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
Neanderthals possess a hyoid bone essentially identical to ours, ear structures tuned to the frequency range of human speech, and the same variant of the FOXP2 gene implicated in speech and language disorders. None of this demonstrates language — the anatomy permits speech without requiring it, and FOXP2's role has been considerably narrowed since its discovery. But the composite technologies, cooperative hunting and long-distance exchange of this period are hard to account for without some form of it.