Researchers are recovering the lost voice of the _______(1)_______. Neanderthals were humans’ closest cousins. Now their vocal tract has been ____(2)____ by Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton.
Robert McCarthy: What I and my colleagues did is to try to predict where the voice box, __________(3)__________ in the throats of Neanderthals and other fossil hominids.
A computer synthesizer imagined how the Neanderthal “E” would have sounded:"Yi" [listen]
Compare that to our human “E”: [listen]
That “E” is the _____(4)_____ 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, ________(5)________, 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 ______(6)______ 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.”
