Dmitry Pruss sent me a link to “Natural selection and language genes in humans” by Rob DeSalle, Guilherme Lepski, Analia Arévalo, et al. (Scientific Reports 16:9382, 17 February 2026; open access), adding “I am not ready to believe any of it, but technically it says that the genetic basis of speech consisted of a broad network of genes with the foundations laid back in the ape times and most of the subsequent changes made during the emergence of the common ancestor of our species, Neanderthals and Denisovans.” I too am not ready to believe any of it, but I don’t have the technical background to make any useful judgments, so I present it for your appraisal. The abstract:
In this study we construct lists of candidate genes for articulate language. Analysis of coding regions of over 100 candidate genes for the effects of natural selection (directional episodic selection and relaxed/intensified selection) in the various lineages of primates (thirty-four nonhuman primate species, plus Homo sapiens Neanderthals and Denisovans) revealed a burst of altered selection effects on neural genes at the node leading to the Homo sapiens-Neanderthal-Denisova triad, followed by bursts of selection effects on neural genes related to language in both the Denisovan and Neanderthal lineages. Those latter increases in involvement of neural genes in Neanderthals and Denisovans can be contrasted with the missing or slight response to selection on those same genes in the H. sapiens lineage. The genes involved in these bursts can mostly be classified as involved in synapse structure and maintenance. We develop a hypothesis for how synaptic efficiency could be related to language acquisition in these lineages.
Thanks, Dmitry!
Genes and evolution are not my specialty either, but I’m curious why you are skeptical. Do you not think that language ability arises from how our brains work, or that the structure of our brains is not in large part determined by genetics and subject to evolutionary pressures?
Whether these people have identified the right genes I cannot say, but the basic idea seems plausible to me.
I’m curious why you are skeptical.
Because I’m skeptical of everything that hasn’t been pretty well nailed down. Many decades of immersing myself in the New, often involving exciting discoveries that turn out upon closer inspection to be smoke and mirrors, have taught me that “plausible” is fun but doesn’t have much to do with “true.”
Fair enough. My feeling is that there has to be some collection of genes that are strongly involved in the mechanisms (both physical and neural) for producing language, but like you, I’m not well-informed enough to judge this particular proposal.
Describing the genes in question as “language genes” depends crucially on the assumption that Neanderthals and Denisovans had Language in the sense that we do, and other primates don’t.
I’m not at all hostile to this notion myself, and certainly think that the idea that multiple genes underlie our linguistic ability is much more plausible than attributing it to some unique magical Chomsky gene, whose existence has been deduced by the Master by sheer ratiocination.
Nevertheless, there seems to be some begging of the question going on here. I also note that in the discussion, they somewhat undermine their thesis by talking about multiple anatomical changes between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and Denisovans, of a kind which they suggest are actually necessary for Language as we know it, and end up rather lamely suggesting that all these genetic changes just produced a “language-ready” brain, which seems a pretty major cop-out to me.
Of course, they may have been bullied into this by all the Chomskyite assertions about how Language must be inextricably linked with behavioural modernity.
And their general interpretative approach strikes me as properly tentative, in the echt scholarly manner.
Incidentally, I was just reading this paper by Salikoko Mufwene
https://mufwene.uchicago.edu/publications/WHAT_AFRICAN_LINGUISTICS_CAN_CONTRIBUTE_TO_EVOLUTIONARY_LINGUISTICS_-_ACAL_43.pdf
which makes the interesting point (among several others) that Proto-World à la Ruhlen may be, not so much unrecoverable by rigorous comparative methodology (true dat) but a complete chimera anyway: if human beings have an innate biologically-based capacity to create Language, why would this only ever have happened once?
if human beings have an innate biologically-based capacity to create Language, why would this only ever have happened once?
If it happened in a group of common ancestors we all descend from and then never was lost. Otherwise yes, there is no reason why it couldn’t have happened several times.
And then there’s still the issue what “create language” actually means; I think we have discussed this elsewhere – is it going from reflexive grunts and shouts to associating them with certain events (something quite a number of more intelligent animals seem to do), or creating words out of phonemes, or two-word sentences, or more complicated constructions?
Each of these steps could have happened once or several times.
It’s a bit like the Intelligent Design crowd’s pet assertion that the human eye couldn’t possibly have evolved, because there is no reproductive advantage in having a partially developed eye. As various actual experts have gleefully pointed out, Well, actually …
Even a very restricted pidgin, lacking nearly all the features to qualify as proper Language, can be extremely useful (which is, of course, why people have kept on creating such things whenever they need to.)
It’s not obvious to me what the advantage is of having language in terms of natural selection. Sure, it helps cooperation, but non-verbal animals can cooperate quite well, in hunting, child-rearing, and what-not.
@Y: Various species of non-verbal animals that seemed like they could cooperate quite well as you say were eventually hunted to extinction by humans. In crudely Darwinian terms, we seem to be better at some relevant species-survival-promoting skill set than they were.
More effective cooperation can confer a survival benefit. There could also be sexual and cultural evolution advantages, like preferring mates who communicate better, or turning poor communicators into outcasts.
Anyway, the weirdest conclusion of the paper seems to be that Neanderthals, and, probably, Denisovans as well far outpaced our own species in language abilities. (Their evolution of the authors construe as a “genetic linguistic ability package” continued at breakneck speed while ours stalled)
JWB: pack predators like wolves and hyenas are skilled collaborators. Bats have cooperative nurseries, where pups are being nursed by the neighbors while their mother is out feeding. It’s not obvious to me what great advantage language would add to them.
Dmitry: Indeed, and I have thought of these scenarios too, but it feels like handwaving. This study in particular suggests that language had immediate and significant advantages, and I’d like to see more rigorous modeling of how that would happen.
DE: Sign languages have and do pop up independently everywhere, and surely spoken ones did too. It’s that liminal area that is hard to imagine, when people had some but not all of what it takes to have a language. Did full speech or full syntax come first? What was it like to be able to have a language, but not easily? Did some people or communities regress from verbal to non-verbal for a while?
Anyway, the weirdest conclusion of the paper seems to be that Neanderthals, and, probably, Denisovans as well far outpaced our own species in language abilities.
Maybe the Neanderthals and Denisovans died out because they were too verbal, and their little children spent all their time composing and solving cryptic crossword puzzles instead of putting edible-looking things into their mouths.
@Y: pack predators like wolves and hyenas are skilled collaborators. Bats have cooperative nurseries, where pups are being nursed by the neighbors while their mother is out feeding. It’s not obvious to me what great advantage language would add to them.
We and our ancestors can collaborate on hunting and gathering and child-raising and tool-making and food-sharing, and we can trade to mutual benefit, and tell stories that convey useful information and keep people in line.
@JF:
I was reading a SF story just the other day with more or less this exact premise, that Neanderthals were actually cleverer than us, and got supplanted by us just on account of being less prolific and/or less violent. Unfortunately, I can’t for the life of me remember where I read it (the idea evidently made more of an impression on me than the execution of it.)
It reminded me a bit of Richard Gabriel’s essay about the rise of C and Unix:
https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
C= Us, Lisp = Neanderthals …
Also
https://xkcd.com/224/
Incidentally, I was just reading this paper by Salikoko Mufwene
https://mufwene.uchicago.edu/publications/WHAT_AFRICAN_LINGUISTICS_CAN_CONTRIBUTE_TO_EVOLUTIONARY_LINGUISTICS_-_ACAL_43.pdf
which makes the interesting point (among several others) that Proto-World à la Ruhlen may be, not so much unrecoverable by rigorous comparative methodology (true dat) but a complete chimera anyway: if human beings have an innate biologically-based capacity to create Language, why would this only ever have happened once?
You can imagine scenarios, such as that Language appeared when our ancestral population was so small that there was only one place where it could appear, or that a person with exceptional verbal talent was needed for a crucial step but then the idea spread, or something. [ETA: Or maybe two people with exceptional talent in the same band.] But it’s probably easier to imagine scenarios where Language reached its current form more than once.
I think there must have been a Most Recent Common Ancestor of Language, but maybe it was Proto-World Pidgin or Proto-World Hooting and Chest-Pounding or something.
I think that, if our language ability is really a polyfactorial thing, and also involves a lot of repurposing of abilities with primarily nonlinguistic applications, as opposed to a suddenly-emergent linguistic enlightenment, it’s at least unnecessary to suppose a single origin of all human languages.
It’s not an impossibility, of course, and one can imagine various scenarios of how it might have come about (another might be that one language happened to have intrinsic virtues which made it more useful than others, or maybe more beautiful.) But monogenesis couldn’t be assumed by default: it would be necessary to exhibit actual evidence for the proposition. (The Ruhlenites would no doubt maintain that that is exactly what they are doing, but in reality they accept crap methodology because they do assume monogenesis.)
If you don’t assume a priori that the many resemblances between all the human languages we actually know of (a tiny fraction of all those that have ever existed, mind) are due to common descent, then the resemblances tell us instead about the many constraints on possible languages which result from our own pan-human mental and physical limitations. To some extent, I suppose, Chomskyites think that is what they are doing, but their endeavours are undermined by their belief that they already know all of the answers that really matter.
What I hadn’t really thought of before reading Mufwene’s paper is that there is a tension between Chomsky-style nativism and the assumption of monogenesis, at least to the extent that the former makes the latter unnecessary.
I suppose that genuine monogenesis, conversely, would make the Chomskyite contention that the resemblances between all known languages are due to “Universal Grammar” somehow located in our minds/genes suspect: the resemblances could just be purely contingent features found in the descendants of the sole protolanguage which happens to have left any descendants in historical times.
(There’s quite a bit in the paper that I think is questionable, incidentally, but it’s still interesting.)
Maybe the Neanderthals and Denisovans died out because they were too verbal, and their little children spent all their time composing and solving cryptic crossword puzzles …
They weren’t verbally clever enough to invent writing, so we’ll never know. Until … some archaeologist uncovers Neanderthal crosswords. (If a lion could compose crosswords, how would we understand the questions?)
Y, people didn’t evolve from wolves, hyenas, or bats. The correct question is what evolutionary advantage is conferred by language ability to primates. But I agree, this question has to be answered, if at all possible. From genetic point of view though, it may be obvious that there is some type of selection happening without any knowledge of what drives this selection.
D.O., Certainly chimps and baboons and other primates already communicate and cooperate to great advantage, without language.
pack predators like wolves and hyenas are skilled collaborators. Bats have cooperative nurseries, where pups are being nursed by the neighbors while their mother is out feeding. It’s not obvious to me what great advantage language would add to them
Well, they didn’t take over the world like we did and now they are dependent for their further survival on our wisdom and goodwill. Bleak prospects…
Just from the abstract it would seem that a glaring omission is the focus on genetic elements that have been linked to language in present-day humans. As it stands from the abstract, the data show correspondences to behaviors that could simply be complex cognition, social complexity, etc. independent of language. I’ll know more if I can read the article, but I am generally sympathetic to the argument that the development was cross-species (or sub-species if you like), which would make room for the possibility that homo Erectus had language when leaving Africa.
Hans: “Well, they didn’t take over the world like we did” Well, that’s debatable. Bats are arguably more prolific than humans, at least within mammals.
They weren’t verbally clever enough to invent writing
Says you! They wrote their crosswords on environmentally sound, degradable material like leaves and bark that have left no traces. It is we blundering moderns who insist on permanently defacing everything.
Having scanned the article, the authors have indeed targeted neural genes which have been posited to be specifically related to language. Thus the ‘glaring omission’ does not exist, making their findings eminently plausible – making the work in my view a finding that can serve as the foundation for future work.
languagehat : I actually thought of that — if Neanderthals _did_ have writing, what medium would they have used? Probably one that would not survive to the present day. Bark would not have.
Hans: “Well, they didn’t take over the world like we did” Well, that’s debatable. Bats are arguably more prolific than humans, at least within mammals.
That may well be, but they still didn’t manage to be able to destroy the world for everybody else, like we did.
We were extremely successful in that, no doubt about it, but the case is that we’ve either domesticated, extinguished, or have been domesticated by (cats and some others) most other mammalian species.
But destroying the ecosystem, we’re not that unique about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
It’s not as bad as _that_. The ecosystem will probably recover in about 10-ish million years which is basically nothing.
I’ve seen it suggested that humans have more intelligence than they usefully need, and likewise that langugage is developed way beyond what could add survival benefit.
The answer proposed was sexual selection: to impress the ladies and increase ones procreation chances. The human equivalent of the peacock’s tail.
Peter Grubtal: I read the first and second assertions, but I do not see a connection between the two. I thought the sexual selection theory was relatively uncontroversial for the origin of language? What does the first one have to do with the second? And what does it have to do with “ladies”?
There’s also the possibility that some aspects of Language (even all of it) might be spandrels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)
I’ve no problem myself with the idea that an ability to create – or appreciate – Modernist poetry (for example) might confer no reproductive advantage whatsoever*, and have no evolutionary benefit at all. There are, after all, other criteria of worth …
* In this particular instance, possibly the converse …
Talking of which, “synaptic efficiency” sounds like a pretty useful thing to have in general, whether you fritter away its benefits in chattering about Gathering all day, or just get on with the Serious Business of Hunting mammoths to extinction in companionable Manly Silence.
(See! I can do sociobiology too!)
But bats, as a group, are hardly comparable to us. They’re easily ten times as old, and while species aren’t really countable the Wikipedia figure of “at least 1500 known species” sounds fair.
Combine the lagging language abilities of proto-humans compared to Neanderthals with recent research showing a sexual imbalance in proto-human-Neanderthal mating… could lead to some novel ideas about how language evolved. Maybe time to re-read what Darwin had to say about sexual selection.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
Easy. Women prefer men who talk to them occasionally, instead of spending all their time hunting mammoth with their bros.
“Gosh! I bet you say that to all the Homo sapiens girls …”
Dmitry has made a convincing case elsewhere that the imbalance is due not to mating preferences (of which we can say nothing) to “toxicity” of particular lineages of X and Y chromosomes, a destructive side of the competition between genes. This effect can be seen also in how sapiens sapiens Y chromosomes completely replaced “native” Neanderthal lineages after the first (otherwise extinct) sapiens sapiens migration out of Africa.
they didn’t take over the world like we did
Sounds like we might very easily not have done:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans
(Accounts for why all humans look pretty much identical, a thing many have been struck by. Humpty Dumpty actually points this out to one of them, with what, I must say, is his characteristic lack of tact. One should bear in mind that humans are surprisingly sensitive on this point.)
“the period between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago appears as a crucial tipping point for the emergence of modern language.”
PLoS One. 2025 Jun 4;20(6):e0325059.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0325059
An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years
Ivan Colagè Francesco d’Errico
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12136325/
See Table 1 and Supplement Table 1
PLOS ONE in all-caps.
Until 2011 PLoS ONE; PLoS stood for “Public Library of Science”, ONE has no known meaning (it isn’t number 1 in any sense I can come up with).
A big weakness in this thought-experiment-with-statistics seems to be the assumptions about the relevant kinds of cultural transmission requiring full-dress Language of the modern type. (They do address this a bit, but seem nevertheless to have made some pretty arbitrary assumptions in places.)
I was reminded rather of the builders in Philosophical Investigations. Slab!
I like this bit, which seems quite relevant to our discussion (in fact, their whole caveats section is pretty good):
Not open-access, alas, though one gets the idea anyway.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/reconsidering-the-link-between-past-material-culture-and-cognition-in-light-of-contemporary-huntergatherer-material-use/A121ADFA3627FE054641F13FA2E20E05