The language and the use of the voice to express it has occupied experts in anthropology, archeology, biology, philosophy, psychology … far from consensus, who have dedicated time to the study of the origins of language think that lLegar to acceptable conclusions is very complicated to … Science. Paleontology does not help to know when we had the ability to speak, the most common form of language. When he died, all soft parts of the phoner apparatus that in one way or another participate in speech: lungs, larynx, vocal ropes, tongue, lips … they break down and disappear quickly.
Of course, the brain is not preserved and, therefore, the areas of Broca and Wernicke and the angular turn, the three essential areas in the control of the emission and understanding of language. Without information in the fossil registry, everything is reduced to proposing suggestive theories From different points of view, which can seduce but not solve.
Speech has two components: issuance and reception. There is no evidence in the fossil registry, but from the second they are preserved andn some cases the middle ear boneshammer, yunque and stirrup, whose size and shape – the data needed for research – can be estimated digitally once insulated from the temporal bone by computed microtomography.
Speech has two components: issuance and reception. From the first there are no evidences in the fossil registry
A member of our team, Ignacio Martínez, sought the collaboration of acoustic engineering experts and together they were able to build extinct species audiograms. Audiograms are graphics of auditory capacity, which are obtained by comparing the level of acoustic power (measured in decibels) and the frequency of sound waves (measured in Hercies). For a given power, chimpanzees have a good audition between 1000 and 3000 Hercios. From that last figure, its auditory capacity declines quickly. Our auditory competition is estimated between 20 and 20,000 homes, although our best audition is in a range of between 1000 and 5000 torts.
With that bandwidth we are able to pronounce and hear the combination of vocal and consonant sounds. In good logic, auditory capacity must have evolved along with the possibility of emitting complex sounds. And that complexity would make no meaning if we do not understand it. So the bandwidth can be a good indicator of The ability to possess language.
This research line has found out that Audiograms Of our oldest ancestors, such as the Australopitecos, they were similar to those of the chimpanzees. The Neanderthals, on the other hand, possessed indistinguishable audiograms of ours. From this surprising information, it follows that, quite possibly, language could have emerged both in ‘Homo Sapiens’ and in ‘Homo Neanderthalensis’ independently and convergent more than 300,000 years ago.
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