Neanderthal lives led to languages?

Neanderthals, our vanished prehistoric cousins, perhaps possessed languages, tribes and chiefs, suggests an archeologist.

Despite the similarities, however, a second study reconstructing Neanderthal noggins suggests that they had brains that developed during infancy much differently than ours.

Neanderthals (or Neandertals for many scientists), a stocky human species with a distinctly robust skeleton compared to modern humans, lived throughout Europe and the Near East before disappearing from the archeological record around 30,000 years ago. In the current Oxford Journal of Archeology, a report by Brian Hayden of Canada's Simon Fraser University, looks at how Neanderthals used caves, transported stone tools and the kinds of items they left behind to try and suss out their lives.

While some past researchers have concluded that Neanderthals exhibited little more complexity than chimpanzees, living at most in small troops, Hayden finds in his review that they lived complicated lives...

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