Our speech and language capacities enable us to acquire vocabularies of many thousands of words, assemble them into a myriad of structured meaningful expressions, and convey thoughts to others by mapping meaning to sound, and back again. How and when our linguistic capacities evolved is part of an ongoing debate. For example, certain hypotheses concerning the origins of language posit the existence of just a single causative DNA mutation, occurring on the human lineage after splitting from the other hominin branches, and most probably within the last 100,000 years. Other accounts consider the evolutionary emergence of proficient spoken language as a multistage process involving multiple phenotypic components and multiple genomic changes, with some hypotheses placing importance on gene–culture interactions. The genetic underpinnings of our speech and language skills are highly multifactorial, and through screens of DNA sequencing and genotyping data, we are beginning to identify the genetic variants involved. Here, we use the identified genetic variants and genes to empirically evaluate different evolutionary accounts, to assess which are more compatible with the available molecular data. For this, we make use of genome-wide catalogues of evolutionary changes that occurred on the different lineages during distinct evolutionary periods, generated by anthropologists from the complete genome sequences for modern and ancestral humans, Neandertals, Denisovans and great apes that are becoming available.
Example publication:
Alagöz, G., Eising, E., Mekki, Y., Bignardi, G., Fontanillas, P., 23andMe Research Team, Nivard, M. G., Luciano, M., Cox, N. J., Fisher, S. E., & Gordon, R. L. (2025). The shared genetic architecture and evolution of human language and musical rhythm. Nature Human Behaviour, 9, 376-390. doi:10.1038/s41562-024-02051-y. [pdf]
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