GENETICS × LANGUAGE

The Language Gene That Wasn't

2007 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

For a while, science thought it had found the language gene: FOXP2, broken in a family with a severe speech disorder, carrying two changes that arose in our lineage and an apparent signature of recent selection. Then ancient DNA showed that Neanderthals carried the very same changes, and a 2018 reanalysis of hundreds of genomes found no sign of recent selection at all: the celebrated sweep appears to have been an artefact of who had been sampled. What remains is a gene vital to speech, and no molecular birthday for language.

Why it matters

This entry earns its place by being wrong in public: a beautiful story that a wider sample took apart, in full view. Language must rest on some genetic foundation, but nothing here points to a single gene or a single moment, and the two changes once thought to mark its arrival were already present in our extinct cousins. How language began remains among the hardest open questions about our species, and an honest timeline should say so.

Dating & uncertainty

FOXP2 was identified through a family in which mutations disrupt speech, and two amino-acid changes derived in the human lineage plus a sweep signal made it 'the language gene'. The anchor marks 2007, when ancient DNA showed that Neanderthals carried the same two changes, which would place any sweep before our lineages split; a 2013 study found a regulatory change absent or not fixed in Neanderthals, and in 2018 the original sweep signal did not survive a wider reanalysis, which traces it to the composition of the earlier samples.

Sources

1. Krause et al. (2007), Current Biology · The derived FOXP2 variant of modern humans was shared with Neandertalsdoi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.10.008
2. Maricic et al. (2013), Molecular Biology and Evolution · A recent evolutionary change affects a regulatory element in the human FOXP2 genedoi:10.1093/molbev/mss271
3. Atkinson et al. (2018), Cell · No evidence for recent selection at FOXP2 among diverse human populationsdoi:10.1016/j.cell.2018.06.048

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:545.2 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day