How did humans evolve language? It may be far more ancient than scientists realized
A new study links genetic regions that predate the divergence of modern humans and Neanderthals to language
By Jackie Flynn Mogensen for Scientific American
In 2001 scientists studying human language made a breakthrough: by looking at the DNA of a family with a rare speech disability, they found that a mutation in a single gene called FOXP2 were responsible for the condition. At the time, scientists thought the gene could be the key to how humans evolved language.
“That was the gene that launched 1,000 ships,” says Jacob Michaelson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa. Since then the picture has blurred: across the population, FOXP2 doesn’t seem to be single-handedly driving our language abilities. Something else must be going on.
And now new research from Michaelson and his colleagues adds a piece to the puzzle: some regions of our genome that are influenced by the activity of genes like FOXP2 may be much more ancient than scientists realized.
In a study published in Science Advances on Wednesday, Michaelson and his team grouped regions of the human genome by age and looked for which groups tracked closest to language ability. They found that the regions that “pack the most punch,” according to Michaelson, are among the most ancient parts of our genome—having evolved before modern humans split from Neanderthals. Scientists call these genetic regions “human ancestor quickly evolved regions” (HAQERs).
“It’s not very much of the genome,” Michaelson says, explaining that these regions account for around a tenth of a percent of our DNA. “But we found that a huge amount of the genetic variation that explains individual [language] differences was in there.”
The researchers analyzed the genomes of 350 elementary school students in Iowa who took 17 language ability tests at various times between kindergarten and fourth grade. A trend emerged: the ancient HAQERs tracked with a person’s language ability. They found the same trend among more than 100,000 individuals enrolled in other studies, such as the UK Biobank health study and SPARK (Simons Powering Autism Research), a large study on autism.
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