It's been 30,000 years since Neanderthals walked the earth but now we can hear what they sounded like
Robert McCarthy of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton reconstructed Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate their voice with a computer synthesizer.
The result is a single syllable which sounds strange and unremarkable -- part croaking frog, part burping human
"They would have spoken a bit differently," McCarthy told the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists
"They wouldn't have been able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken language."
McCarthy used 50,000-year-old fossils
to make his reconstruction
He plans to eventually simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence
clipped from: www.cnn.com 