Gene Changes Key to Talk, Study Finds

A few key changes in a single gene help explain why people can talk while mice and apes cannot, researchers said Wednesday.

The gene, called FOXP2, seems to be involved in the face and jaw movements necessary for speech, the researchers in Germany and Britain said.

What is surprising is that the gene is so similar in animals ranging from mice to orangutans to chimpanzees, with a relatively small change having emerged just as modern humans did, between 120,000 and 200,000 years ago, the researchers report in this week’s online issue of the journal Nature.

“It is not the gene that made language possible,” geneticist Wolfgang Enard of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said in a telephone interview.

He said it is probably one of many genes involved in speech and language, which are complex abilities.

But the gene is clearly important. Research last year found that people who lack two normal copies of the gene have considerable difficulty speaking. They not only make mistakes in grammar but cannot always articulate words clearly.

“If you have [only] one functional copy of the gene, as a human, you have problems with language and facial movements,” Enard said.

Enard, Svante Paabo and colleagues at Max Planck and Oxford University in Britain looked at the gene in mice, chimpanzees, orangutans and humans.

It is a highly conserved gene, meaning it has changed little in the 70 million years of evolution that separate mice from people. But Enard said it still had “changed a little bit with two amino acid changes on the human lineage.”

Genes are strings of code, with certain patterns making up amino acids, which in turn are the building blocks of proteins--the basic cell products that underlie biological processes.