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Neanderthals May Have Talked That Talk

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By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times

Published: October 21, 2007

Neanderthals, an archaic human species that dominated Europe until the arrival of modern humans about 45,000 years ago, possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech, according to DNA evidence retrieved from two individuals excavated from El Sidron, a cave in northern Spain.

The new evidence stems from analysis of a gene called FOXP2 which is associated with language.

The human version of the gene differs at two critical points from the chimpanzee version, suggesting that these two changes have something to do with the fact that people can speak and chimps cannot.

The genes of Neanderthals seemed to have passed into oblivion when they vanished from their last refuges in Spain and Portugal some 30,000 years ago, almost certainly driven to extinction by modern humans.

Recent work by Svante Paabo, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has made it clear, however, that some Neanderthal DNA can be extracted from fossils.

Paabo, Johannes Krause and Spanish colleagues who excavated the new bones say they have extracted the Neanderthal version of the relevant part of the FOXP2 gene. It is the same as the human version, they report in the latest issue of Current Biology.

Because many other genes also are involved in the faculty of speech, the new finding suggests but does not prove that Neanderthals had human-like language.

'There is no reason to think Neanderthals couldn't speak like humans with respect to FOXP2, but obviously there are many other genes involved in language and speech,' Paabo said.

The human version of the FOXP2 gene apparently swept through the human population before the Neanderthal and modern human lineages split apart about 350,000 years ago.

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