It’s hard enough to know what Neanderthals looked like, let alone sounded like. However, there’s good reason to suspect our extinct hominin cousins were capable of complex language – and not just grunts and groans.

You may be one of the millions of people who have seen the viral clip from the BBC show Neanderthal: The Rebirth, which explores the so-called “high-pitched voice theory”.

To recreate the sound of Neanderthal voices, vocal coach Patsy Rodenburg worked with a 3D model of a Neanderthal vocal tract, alongside knowledge of their anatomy, such as a deep rib cage, heavy skull, and large nasal cavity. When she applied this understanding to a human singer, the result was an uncanny, high-pitched, nasal shriek. (Watch video here)

This is just one interpretation, but it’s a question that has been attacked from a more scientific angle.

The idea that Neanderthals are heavy-browed, brutish cavemen is an outdated one. An overwhelming amount of evidence now shows that, just like us, they were highly intelligent, culturally complex, and emotionally sensitive beings.

We know that Neanderthals had similar cognitive abilities to us, plus their brains were roughly the same size or bigger than ours, albeit with a different shape, so we can loosely assume they had the necessary neural hardware to compute language.