Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Rcherche Scientifique, said the jawbone had probably been cut into to remove flesh, including the tongue. Crucially, the butchery was similar to that used by humans to cut up deer carcass in the early Stone Age. "Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them," Rozzi said.
Scientists studying the DNA of Neanderthals say they can find no evidence that this ancient species ever interbred with modern humans. But our evolutionary cousins may well have been able to speak as well as us, said Prof Svante Paabo from Germany's Max Planck Institute.
Talk about a long silence – no one has heard their voices for 30,000 years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up – or at least a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf.
Their results show that the genomes of modern humans and Neanderthals are at least 99.5-percent identical, but despite this genetic similarity, and despite the two species having cohabitated the same geographic region for thousands of years, there is ...
