Some scientists claim Neanderthals have red hair and fair skin. Anthropologist Robert McCarthy went beyond and imagined how they might have sounded like. By creating a model of vocal tracts from a 50,000-year-old fossil skull from France, McCarthy was able to simulate the voice of Neanderthals.

Together with his team from Florida Atlantic University, McCarthy discovered that Neanderthals could indeed speak but couldn't quite process "quantal vowels" yet. These are the sounds which makes human speech subtle.

Check the voice of the Neanderthal from the player below. McCarthy and his team modeled a Neanderthal voice saying "E." Compared to our voice today, the Neanderthals lacked the capability to speak "beat" and "bit" differently. This would have limited a Neanderthal's speech significantly, says McCarthy.

So far, this research has been met with criticism especially from Washington University's Erik Trinkaus who believes that the mouth's anatomy is not important, rather, the control. McCarthy hopes to follow-up the research by simulating a Neanderthal sentence.