Calling Neanderthal
Aaargh!
Ough!
Huh-huh-grumpf… ouch!?
Well, speaking isn’t always that easy.
In Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film “Quest for Fire” a group of Palaeolithic humans travels its primeval world in search of a flame to relight their extinct fire. The film’s most startling feature is the invented language spoken by the prehistoric humans. It was created by British novelist and composer Anthony Burgess, and is rich in words like “Aaaargh!”, “Grumpf!” and so on.
When Annaud directed the shooting in 1981 there was nothing known about the genetic principles of language.
That has changed. 17 years after the premiere of “Quest for Fire” British geneticist, Anthony Monaco, discovered the “language gene” FOXP2 (coding for a transcription factor) that is implicated in the development of language skills.
Recently, however, another amazing result of anthropological research was published. Robert McCarthy, an Assistant Professor at Florida Atlantic University, has reconstructed Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate prehistoric man’s voice. Listen to the breathy sound of a Neanderthal saying “E”.
And now compare this 50,000-year-old rattle to another “E” pronounced by one of today’s humans. Lovely sound, right?
Fortunately, McCarthy’s linguistic team won’t stop at the “E”. They’re planning to simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence soon. Stay tuned!
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Comments
@Michael Liss:
Wonder what the LAST words of a transgenic hFOXP2 mouse will be.
Maybe … “They aren’t so clever at all, these human smarty-pants - look at my special technique to outfox this mousetrap…” [WHAM!!]
@Beeblebrox - Hey, do you know also this crazy biologist’s famous last words (saying “I know this snake, it is harmless!”)?
Or the last Neanderthal’s last words? (”Ough, I wonder who is living in this dark & huge cave…”)
‘Yeti hair’ to get DNA analysis
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7525060.stm
Can Mr.Gene optimize for expression Yeti after a few genes have been sequenced?
Btw. I just heard a report on the radio that songbirds seem to depend on FOXP2 as well in order to pick up their parent’s melodies.
Very interesting protein.
Wonder what the first words of a transgenic hFOXP2 mouse will be. Probably “cheese” or something. Hopefully not “fourtytwo”. Then we’re screwed.
Here’s a nice article about FOXP2 & cultural selection pressure on this protein:
http://ebbolles.typepad.com/babels_dawn/2006/10/the_human_foxp2.html
Excerpt:
“The evolutionary lineages leading to humans and mice diverged about 70 million years (Myr) ago. Thus, during the roughly 130 Myr of evolution that separate the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees from the mouse, a single amino-acid change occurred in the FOXP2 protein. By contrast, since the human and chimpanzee lineages diverged about 4.6—6.2 Myr ago, two fixed amino-acid changes occurred on the human lineage whereas none occurred on the chimpanzee and the other primate lineages, except for one change on the orang-utan lineage.”