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Jun. 28th, 2004 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheBones point to origins of speech
New research suggests humans may have been able to talk much longer ago than previously thought, the Spanish media has reported.
The claim is based on ear bones from skulls found in the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) at Atapuerca, northern Spain, in the early 1990s.
They are said to belong to Homo heidelbergensis, who lived some 350,000 years ago and is thought to have been an ancestor of the Neanderthals.
Some scientists believe humans only acquired the ability to speak about 160,000 years ago.
[...] "Human hearing differs from that of chimpanzees... in maintaining a relatively high sensitivity from 2-4kHz, a region that contains relevant acoustic information in spoken language," wrote the team.
H. heidelbergensis had "a human-like pattern" of sound power transmission through the outer and middle ear at frequencies between 3 and 5kHz, they added.
This contrasts with our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees, which pick up sounds peaking at around 1 or 8kHz - outside the normal range of human language.
New research suggests humans may have been able to talk much longer ago than previously thought, the Spanish media has reported.
The claim is based on ear bones from skulls found in the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) at Atapuerca, northern Spain, in the early 1990s.
They are said to belong to Homo heidelbergensis, who lived some 350,000 years ago and is thought to have been an ancestor of the Neanderthals.
Some scientists believe humans only acquired the ability to speak about 160,000 years ago.
[...] "Human hearing differs from that of chimpanzees... in maintaining a relatively high sensitivity from 2-4kHz, a region that contains relevant acoustic information in spoken language," wrote the team.
H. heidelbergensis had "a human-like pattern" of sound power transmission through the outer and middle ear at frequencies between 3 and 5kHz, they added.
This contrasts with our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees, which pick up sounds peaking at around 1 or 8kHz - outside the normal range of human language.