HAQERs evolved after hominins split from chimps but before Homo sapiens diverged from Neanderthals

Amazing stuff!

"... Researchers built on past studies documenting the language abilities—and saliva—of 350 elementary school children. They wanted to analyze genetic regulatory sequences called Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions (HAQERs), which influence how genes get expressed. The students’ DNA helped the team confirm HAQERs’ importance in processing and demonstrating language. Then, the researchers looked for the presence of HAQERs in regions of DNA known to have evolved in ancient primates and hominins.

They found that HAQERs evolved after hominins split from chimps but before Homo sapiens diverged from Neanderthals—meaning complex communication likely preceded our own species. This “sliver of the genome has remained relatively constant, even as other aspects have been going up and up and up to make modern humans smarter and smarter ,” author Jacob Michaelson said in a statement. “We can say humans at least had the ‘hardware’ for language earlier than what we previously thought.”

As for why the HAQERs didn’t continue to evolve much after the Neanderthal-human split, the researchers suggest it’s because they promote fetal development—and give babies bigger heads. That tradeoff would have quickly cost the lives of ancient mothers and infants."

From the abstract:

"Language is a defining feature of our species, yet the genomic changes enabling it remain poorly understood. Despite decades of work since FOXP2’s discovery, we still lack a clear picture of which regions shaped language evolution and how variation contributes to present-day phenotypic differences.

Using an evolutionary stratified polygenic score approach, we find that human ancestor quickly evolved regions (HAQERs) are associated with spoken language abilities (discovery N = 350, total replication N > 100,000).

HAQERs evolved before the human-Neanderthal split, giving hominins increased binding of Forkhead and Homeobox transcription factors, and show evidence of balancing selection across the past 20,000 years.

Language-associated variants in HAQERs appear more prevalent in Neanderthals, and HAQER-like sequences show convergent evolution across vocal-learning mammals. Our results reveal how ancient innovations continue shaping human language."

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Ancient regulatory evolution shapes individual language abilities in present-day humans (open access)

Fig. 1. Overview of this study and key findings. (ka, thousand years ago; Ma, million years ago.)

People living in Antarctica are developing a new accent

Given the conditions, this is not really a surprise! E.g. whenever someone joins a new group, this individual will try to adopt quickly to the other group members including speech. Plus, the researchers and staff are international!

And it certainly has little to do with the Antarctic winter per se as the title of the research paper suggests!

"A study of 26 individuals who stayed at the Rothera Research Station in Antarctica for six months in 2018 reveals that living on the frozen continent can change people’s accents. ..."

From the abstract:

"An acoustic analysis was made of the speech characteristics of individuals recorded before and during a prolonged stay in Antarctica. A computational model was used to predict the expected changes due to close contact and isolation, which were then compared with the actual recorded productions. The individuals were found to develop the first stages of a common accent in Antarctica whose phonetic characteristics were in some respects predicted by the computational model. These findings suggest that the phonetic attributes of a spoken accent in its initial stages emerge through interactions between individuals causing speech production to be incrementally updated."

People living in Antarctica are developing a new accent Study shows subtle changes in speech accents among Antarctica's few temporary inhabitants.

Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent Antarctica is a bleak, remote and dark place during the winter, but a handful of people each year brave the conditions to live in almost totally cut off from the rest of the world. The experience can change how they speak.

Phonetic change in an Antarctic winter (open access)

When We First Talked

Very recommendable!

How to “Read” the Brain Signals Underlying Human Speech

Recommendable! This research has the potential to rewrite textbooks!


"“We’ve laid the groundwork for synthesizing speech from neural activity,” "

"There’s an idea that’s literally in textbooks that certain regions along the motor cortex strip relate to different parts of the body. High up on the head, you’ve got the leg, and lower down, you have voice.
Stavisky: The canonical textbook picture is of a human body draped over the brain.
Shenoy: It’s called the homunculus. It dates back over 70 years and has become indoctrinated – Sergey directly questioned it. He said maybe a brain area for the hand and arm is also related to speech."

"[the researchers] wondered if the hand knob brain area [of the motor cortex] might be active during more than just attempted hand and arm movements. Previous studies, for example, had hinted that the neural circuits for manual gestures might be interlinked with those for speech. ...

[researcher] recorded neural activity when participants repeated short words like “beet” and “seal.” The words sparked different brain activity patterns, his team found. ... could then “read” the patterns to decipher which words or syllables had been spoken.

“We’ve found that this part of the brain is active when moving your tongue, mouth, and face,” ... There’s some evidence in the literature that there’s a close relationship between our neural circuits for hand gestures and speech gestures – movement of the tongue, the lips, the jaw ... 

We know very little about speech because, until now, we’ve had very little access to it at single-neuron resolution. People have studied speech using other methods – like ECoG [electrocorticography], where electrodes are placed on the surface of the brain. But that averages together the activity of thousands of neurons. Our study is the first time activity from over a hundred electrodes – each recording from one or just a handful of individual cells from motor areas of the brain – has been studied in relation to producing speech. That’s the key distinction. ... The participants in this study have tetraplegia caused by spinal cord injury – they can’t use their arms or legs – but they can still talk."

How to “Read” the Brain Signals Underlying Human Speech | HHMI.org: Scientists have discovered that a brain region that controls hand and arm movement also offers a window into studying speech. The work brings researchers a step closer to building medical devices that help people who cannot speak.