Overview
- The peer-reviewed study, published Wednesday in Science Advances, links a small set of ancient regulatory regions to modern language ability and finds the same sequences in Neanderthal genomes.
- These Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions make up under 0.1% of DNA yet carry about 188–200 times more language-associated variation than the rest of the genome.
- The researchers sequenced 350 Iowa schoolchildren who took 17 language tests over several years and then saw the same signal in more than 100,000 people in UK Biobank and SPARK.
- HAQERs act as gene-expression switches rather than protein-coding genes, which helps explain why many small DNA changes can add up to a large effect on language skills.
- The authors propose a balancing tradeoff in evolution, since HAQERs boost prenatal brain growth that can enlarge infant head size and raise childbirth risks, and they plan family-based follow-ups to separate genetic effects from environmental “genetic nurture.”