Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?

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Abstract

Human language is unique among all forms of animal communication. It is unlikely that any other species, including our close genetic cousins the Neanderthals, ever had language, and so-called sign ‘language’ in Great Apes is nothing like human language. Language evolution shares many features with biological evolution, and this has made it useful for tracing recent human history and for studying how culture evolves among groups of people with related languages. A case can be made that language has played a more important role in our species’ recent (circa last 200,000 years) evolution than have our genes.

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The complete genome sequence of a Neandertal from the Altai Mountains

Kay Prüfer, Fernando Racimo, Nick Patterson … (2014)

We present a high-quality genome sequence of a Neandertal woman from Siberia. We show that her parents were related at the level of half siblings and that mating among close relatives was common among her recent ancestors. We also sequenced the genome of a Neandertal from the Caucasus to low coverage. An analysis of the relationships and population history of available archaic genomes and 25 present-day human genomes shows that several gene flow events occurred among Neandertals, Denisovans and early modern humans, possibly including gene flow into Denisovans from an unknown archaic group. Thus, interbreeding, albeit of low magnitude, occurred among many hominin groups in the Late Pleistocene. In addition, the high quality Neandertal genome allows us to establish a definitive list of substitutions that became fixed in modern humans after their separation from the ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans.

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Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

Wolfgang Haak, Iosif Lazaridis, Nick Patterson … (2015)

We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost 400,000 polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of Western and Far Eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ∼8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ∼24,000-year-old Siberian. By ∼6,000-5,000 years ago, farmers throughout much of Europe had more hunter-gatherer ancestry than their predecessors, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but also from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ∼4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ∼75% of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least ∼3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for a steppe origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe.

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Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language.

Wolfgang Enard, Molly Przeworski, Simon E. Fisher … (2002)

Language is a uniquely human trait likely to have been a prerequisite for the development of human culture. The ability to develop articulate speech relies on capabilities, such as fine control of the larynx and mouth, that are absent in chimpanzees and other great apes. FOXP2 is the first gene relevant to the human ability to develop language. A point mutation in FOXP2 co-segregates with a disorder in a family in which half of the members have severe articulation difficulties accompanied by linguistic and grammatical impairment. This gene is disrupted by translocation in an unrelated individual who has a similar disorder. Thus, two functional copies of FOXP2 seem to be required for acquisition of normal spoken language. We sequenced the complementary DNAs that encode the FOXP2 protein in the chimpanzee, gorilla, orang-utan, rhesus macaque and mouse, and compared them with the human cDNA. We also investigated intraspecific variation of the human FOXP2 gene. Here we show that human FOXP2 contains changes in amino-acid coding and a pattern of nucleotide polymorphism, which strongly suggest that this gene has been the target of selection during recent human evolution.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Mark Pagel: m.pagel@reading.ac.uk

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): BMC Biol

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): BMC Biol

Title: BMC Biology

Publisher: BioMed Central (London )

ISSN (Electronic): 1741-7007

Publication date (Electronic): 24 July 2017

Publication date PMC-release: 24 July 2017

Publication date Collection: 2017

Volume: 15

Electronic Location Identifier: 64

Affiliations

ISNI 0000 0004 0457 9566, GRID grid.9435.b, School of Biological Sciences, , University of Reading, ; Reading, RG6 6UR UK

Article

Publisher ID: 405

DOI: 10.1186/s12915-017-0405-3

PMC ID: 5525259

PubMed ID: 28738867

SO-VID: b2491312-7bd8-401c-8c56-3e14ec836a9a

License:

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Funding

Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000781, European Research Council;

Award ID: 268744

Award Recipient : Mark Pagel

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Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?

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Radiology and Natural Language Processing

Most cited references 42

The complete genome sequence of a Neandertal from the Altai Mountains

Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language.

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