Thursday, October 18, 2007

Newsflash: Neanderthals had modern FOXP2


of present-day humans in the only two positions that differ
between human and chimpanzee. Leaving out the
unlikely scenario of gene flow, this establishes that
these changes were present in the common ancestor



"Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant
creature rivals modern humans in language ability.
Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary
pressures our capacity for language evolved is of great
interest. Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives,
the Neandertals, share with modern humans two
evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been
implicated in the development of speech and language.
We furthermore find that in Neandertals, these changes
lie on the common modern human haplotype, which
previously was shown to have been subject to a selective
sweep. These results suggest that these genetic
changes and the selective sweep predate the common
ancestor (which existed about 300,000–400,000 years
ago) of modern human and Neandertal populations.
This is in contrast to more recent age estimates of the
selective sweep based on extant human diversity data.
Thus, these results illustrate the usefulness of retrieving
direct genetic information from ancient remains for
understanding recent human evolution."







Anne Gilbert said...

I always knew Neandertals could talk! Or at least I always suspected it! But I doubt the old "grunting" picture will die easily.
Anne G

Julien Riel-Salvatore said...

Anne - the old grunting picture will unfortunately probably never die. However, it's like some of the stuff I mentioned in my discussion of Neanderthal toothpicking... Neanderthals hunted, made complex tools, moved about their landscape logistically, procured far-ranging raw material, on occasion displayed symbolic behavior, etc, etc, etc... PLUS, they had essentially modern voiceboxes and large, complex brains.

I don't think it's just the genetic evidence that should convince us that they were able to speak something very much like modern humans - plus, I'd be willing to bet some serious cash that "Neanderthal language" is a misnomer to begin with. Look at the geographical range of the Neanderthals and look at how many languages you have in the same area today, all likely derived from a likely more or less common stock some thousands of years old. these languages are spoken by groups that were historically so much more interconnected than Neanderthals (or EUP groups for that matter) likely ever were. I'd be more than willing to bet that there were a wide range of more-or-less closely related languages being spoken in Late Pleistocene Eurasia in the Middle Paleolithic.