In 1989, a nearly complete hyoid bone — the small U-shaped bone in the throat that supports speech — was found with a roughly 60,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton in Kebara Cave, Israel. Researchers reported its shape was almost indistinguishable from a modern human's, and a 2013 micro-structural re-analysis reinforced the idea that Neanderthals may have had some capacity for spoken language, though soft tissue leaves no fossils and the exact origin of language remains debated. In the Book of Genesis, humanity once shared a single language and built a tower reaching toward heaven; God is said to have scattered their speech into many tongues so they could no longer understand one another — a myth that, strikingly, frames language not as a bridge but as a punishment. What gestures alone could never carry, spoken words finally could: a bridge from one mind to another.