FOXP2 gene

From ScienceDaily: “A paper published in 2002 (Enard et al., Nature 418, 869-872) claimed there was a selective sweep relatively recently in human evolutionary history that could largely account for our linguistic abilities and even help explain how modern humans were able to flourish so rapidly in Africa within the last 50-100,000 years,” says senior author Brenna Henn, a population geneticist at Stony Brook University and UC Davis. “I was immediately interested in dating the selective sweep and re-analyzing FOXP2 with larger and more diverse datasets, especially in more African populations.” Henn says that when the original 2002 work was done, the researchers did not have access to the modern sequencing technology that now provides data on whole genomes, so Read More ›