GENETICS × LANGUAGE

FOXP2: the So-Called Language Gene

2007 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

FOXP2, found through a British family with a severe speech disorder, was called the language gene, until ancient DNA showed in 2007 that Neanderthals carried the same changes.

FOXP2 is a gene identified from a British family several of whose members presented verbal dyspraxia, a severe disorder of the organisation of speech movements. Two amino acid substitutions that arose in the human lineage, associated with an apparent signature of recent selection, earned it the designation language gene. That interpretation has been abandoned. Ancient DNA showed in 2007 that Neanderthals carried the same two substitutions, which would place any selection before the separation of the two lineages, and a reanalysis published in 2018, bearing on several hundred genomes, found no signal of recent selection. A selective sweep is recognised by the impoverishment of diversity around the favoured variant, which its spread carries along with its neighbourhood; but a sample concentrated on one population, or mixing populations of different histories, produces the same impoverishment in the absence of any selection.

Why it matters

The gene remains necessary to the motor control of speech, but nothing authorises attributing to it the appearance of language or dating that appearance. The case moreover documents the ordinary working of scientific verification: a widely diffused hypothesis, corrected in public by the broadening of the data. The origin of language remains one of the least resolved questions in the study of the species.

Dating & uncertainty

The anchor corresponds to 2007, the date of the Neanderthal result. A 2013 study reported a regulatory change absent or unfixed in Neanderthals; the original selection signal did not survive the 2018 reanalysis, which attributes it to the composition of the samples then available.

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