A newly published study from University of Iowa Health Care suggests that a surprisingly small portion of human DNA plays a major role in language ability. Researchers also found that these influential genetic sequences emerged before modern humans and Neanderthals split from a common ancestor, pushing the origins of language-related biology further back in time than previously recognized.
Jacob Michaelson, PhD, Roy J. Carver Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine, says language is one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens. Many animals communicate, but humans possess an exceptional ability to create, adapt, and expand language in ways unmatched by other species.
Michaelson and his colleagues, including first author Lucas Casten, PhD, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, set out to investigate how human language development may have been influenced by genetic regulatory elements known as Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions (HAQERs).
"What we're seeing is how a very small part of the genome can have an outsized influence, not just on who we were as a species, but on who we are as individuals," Michaelson says, noting that HAQERs represent less than a tenth of a percent of the genome but drive roughly 200 times more impact on language ability than any other genomic region.
