This is really advanced molecular anthropology:
Neanderthals, an archaic human species that dominated Europe until the arrival of modern humans about 45,000 years ago, possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech, according to DNA evidence retrieved from two individuals excavated from El Sidron, a cave in northern Spain.
The evidence stems from analysis of a gene called FOXP2 which is associated with language. The human version of the gene differs at two critical points from the chimpanzee version, suggesting that these two changes have something to do with the fact that people can speak and chimps cannot.
The genes of Neanderthals seemed to have passed into oblivion when they vanished from their last refuges in Spain and Portugal 30,000 years ago, almost certainly driven to extinction by modern humans. But recent work by Svante Paabo, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, it has made clear that some Neanderthal DNA can be extracted from fossils.
Paabo, Johannes Krause, an anthropologist, and Spanish colleagues who excavated the new bones say they have now extracted the Neanderthal version of the relevant part of the FOXP2 gene. It is the same as the human version, they report in the Friday issue of Current Biology.
Because many other genes are also involved in the faculty of speech, new finding suggests but does not prove that Neanderthals had human-like language.
More about can be found here:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/18/asia/cave.phpThe original paper will be published in Current Biology on friday
Enjoy
Johannes
