What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?

It’s hard enough to know what Neanderthals looked like, let alone sounded like. However, there’s good reason to suspect our extinct hominin cousins were capable of complex language – and not just grunts and groans. 

The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

You may be one of the millions of people who have seen the viral clip from the BBC show Neanderthal: The Rebirth, which explores the so-called “high-pitched voice theory”.

To recreate the sound of Neanderthal voices, vocal coach Patsy Rodenburg worked with a 3D model of a Neanderthal vocal tract, alongside knowledge of their anatomy, such as a deep rib cage, heavy skull, and large nasal cavity. When she applied this understanding to a human singer, the result was an uncanny, high-pitched, nasal shriek.

This is just one interpretation, but it’s a question that has been attacked from a more scientific angle.

The idea that Neanderthals are heavy-browed, brutish cavemen is an outdated one. An overwhelming amount of evidence now shows that, just like us, they were highly intelligent, culturally complex, and emotionally sensitive beings. 

We know that Neanderthals had similar cognitive abilities to us, plus their brains were roughly the same size or bigger than ours, albeit with a different shape, so we can loosely assume they had the necessary neural hardware to compute language.

In 2021, anthropologists created digital reconstructions of the bones in Neanderthal skulls and found that they were capable of perceiving, as well as producing, speech.

They found they possessed a hearing capacity between 4-5 kHz, which is a close resemblance to modern Homo sapiens. The researcher said this implies Neanderthals had a communication system that was as complex and efficient as modern human speech. It’s likely they had a similar capacity to us to produce human speech, and their ears were "tuned" to perceive these frequencies. 

Other scholars have taken a broader view, using a multidisciplinary approach that combines anatomy, genetics, cognition, culture, and environment. All of this points to the same conclusion: far from crude grunters, Neanderthals may have sounded a lot like us, with some subtle differences. 

“Neanderthals almost certainly spoke languages that were quite like our languages, but seemingly less structurally complex and less functionally flexible,” Antonio Benítez-Burraco, a linguist from the University of Seville, wrote in a pre-print paper that was not peer-reviewed.

“At the very least, one could speculate that the Neanderthal languages could have featured a less complex syntax, a reduced number of functional categories (like determiners or conjunctions), and less distinctive sounds,” he wrote. 

However, very little is known about when humans started using complex language. Estimates vary massively, ranging from as late as 50,000 years ago to over 2 million years ago, around when the Homo genus first evolved. Neanderthals existed between approximately 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, so it’s possible that they lived in a world where language had not yet arisen.

What is clear is that Neanderthals were not mute shadows of humanity, but active creators of a complex social and cultural world. Whether their conversations were expressed in a higher pitch or with simpler grammar than our own, their voices were almost certainly filled with rich meaning, emotion, and connection.