On Wednesday, June 13th, our Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology class visited the Musée de L’homme Exposition Néandertal. At the front entrance of the museum, there was a wall of signs saying “Welcome” in an assortment of different languages. Later on in the museum, there was an interactive activity in which we could wear headphones to try and emulate the language sounds of Neanderthals.
The Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area are both brain regions that I have learned about in almost all of my psychology and neuroscience classes when trying to explain how we learn a language and speak words. In Neanderthals, several morphological characteristics, like the lowered larynx and the hyoid bone, allowed them to articulate vowel sounds. Other indirect measurements of communication can be seen in their daily behaviors, the existence of social structures and symbolic thought. Relating this back to the brain, the language areas must have been well-developed in order to allow for the articulation of these sounds.
Several studies have found that Neanderthals had evidence of the FoxP2 gene, which is similar to the one associated with language in modern humans, in their DNA. One study, in particular, conducted by Mozzi et al. (2016), analyzed the evolution of ten genes in developmental dyslexia and language impairment. The results showed that the non-coding change frequencies in the genes FoxP2, ROBO1, ROBO2, and CNTNAP2 increased after separation from archaic hominins. This study has created avenues for future more specific research in association studies in language impairment and developmental dyslexia. The authors were able to study this by retrieving mammalian and avian coding sequences from public databases and introducing apparent substitution rate heterogeneity among sites and by causing the estimated phylogeny to have excessively long terminal branches. This study also made me wonder whether specific language impairments are associated with different genes and if they are, which ones they are.
This was an amazing museum experience that allowed me to learn a lot about the evolutionary history of language and how it relates directly to the brain. I learned about the Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, how Neanderthals most likely sounded when they produced vocalizations of vowel sounds, and the role of genes like the FoxP2. A lot of this information reminded me of my NBB201/Anthro200Q class I took last semester. In that class, we learned about the foundations of behavior by looking deeply into the evolutionary history of mankind. How did language develop? We tried to answer questions like that, and this museum visit helped to provide evidence to help elucidate the evolutionary development of language through morphological and genomic changes in the brain and face.
Reference:
Mozzi, A., Forni, D., Clerici, M., Pozzoli, U., Mascheretti, S., Guerini, F. R., . . . Sironi, M. (2016). The evolutionary history of genes involved in spoken and written language: Beyond FOXP2. Scientific Reports, 6(1). doi:10.1038/srep22157