Posted: Jan 06, 2011 5:41 am
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/denisova/foxp2-denisova-humanlike-2011.html
The Denisova fossil also has the modern human version of foxp2, just like neanderthal man does. That makes the origin of foxp2 prior to 250k -400k years ago.
The Denisova fossil also has the modern human version of foxp2, just like neanderthal man does. That makes the origin of foxp2 prior to 250k -400k years ago.
Finding the human-specific substitutions in the Denisova sequence helps to narrow down the evolution of language in the human lineage. If both substitutions were present in the ancestors of the Neandertal-Denisova-African trichotomy, any selection associated with these substitutions must have occurred prior to the divergence of these hominins. By the timeline of Reich and colleagues [1], that would be prior to 250,000-400,000 years ago. Remembering that we do not really know the function of these substitutions, it suggests at least a novel adaptive environment for communication in humans during the early to mid-Middle Pleistocene. Given the evidence of humanlike hyoid and middle ear morphology at Sima de los Huesos, this Middle Pleistocene development of human communication ability may also be unsurprising.