How Neolithic stews, yogurt helped lead to 'F' and 'V' sounds

Changes to the human diet prompted by Neolithic advances in agriculture played a role in human jaw evolution that allowed people to pronounce the consonants F and V, researchers say. Their work — which combines linguistics, speech science and paleoanthropology and appears in the Thursday edition of the US journal Science — indicates that language is not merely a random product of history but was also linked to biological changes at the time. The Neolithic era — spanning from 6,000 to 2,100 BC — was when wheat and barley-based farming took root and animals such as goats, sheep and cows, were domesticated. “Language is not usually studied as a biological phenomenon and it does not normally figure in, say, the curriculum of biology,” said Balthasar Bickel, a researcher at the University of Zurich. “If you think about it, however,