Pleistocene origins of cultural and linguistic diversification: how Homo sapiens and Neanderthals differed

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. It is now widely assumed that Neanderthals possessed a human language-like communication system. What is yet unclear is how different this was from ours. Here we ask whether the communication system of Neanderthals shared a key feature of human languages: ergodicity. Ergodicity allows linguistic evolution to continue for purposes of social differentiation without changing the species-wide language faculty and hampering languages’ universal learnability. We first review the ergodic properties of human language and propose that they are co-indicated by social group differentiation, which are present since the Middle Stone Age. We then examine the archeological record and demography of Neanderthals, which suggest that they mostly lacked the relevant indicators and demographic conditions favoring ergodicity. Finally, we conclude that our findings are also consistent with recent genetic evidence for differences related to routinization and complexity in our species. Hence, the Neanderthal communication system may have differed in fundamental ways from ours, by accumulating changes that reduced learnability by other groups and increased differentiation into subspecies. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2C35Z Life Sciences language evolution, cultural evolution, Neanderthals, Homo Sapiens Published: 2025-05-31 14:35 Last Updated: 2025-05-31 14:35 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: All data are available in the main text Language: English