New Insight About Why Chimpanzees Can’t Speak, But We Can

Why is it that humans can speak, but chimpanzees, with their >98% genetic identity to humans, can’t? For almost a decade scientists have known that the FOXP2 gene is responsible for the mendelian development of language in humans. Theories abound about how a mere 2 amino acid change may have been all that was needed to allow us to surpass the grunting and grumbling of our more ancestral relatives to being able to formulate spoken language.

New findings from US researchers have unveiled new insight into exactly how the FOXP2 gene confers differential transcription and have depicted these findings in vitro. The researchers continue and show these observations in vivo in both humans and chimpanzees as well. By doing so, the authors have provided novel relationships in the gene pathways that regulate the speech development of humans, specifically on the development of the central nervous system (CNS). This insight will hopefully be able to provide opportunities for speech and gene therapy and may prove to help us understand just a bit more about what exactly makes us human.

Read more at Nature: Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2

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