FOXP2, a gene first reported in 2001, was called the language gene. Faraneh Varga Kadem, a neuroscientist at University of London, and her team discovered this gene after examining a pedigree of people with severe speech impairment. Excited, they wrote a paper and published it in Nature.7

[This gene appears to be one of the key factors that carries out a crucial role in how humans use language.]0

Of course, FOXP2 wasn’t the only gene as biology’s complexity meant that no single factor determined all outcomes alone. However, it was clear that a significant portion of the human language ability was linked to this gene.0

FOXP2 was especially highly expressed in fetal brain tissue to create complex language systems; it developed the brain tissue responsible for language processing and the motor nerves that controlled the tongue, vocal cords, and mouth movements.0

Then, was the FOXP2 gene unique to humans with advanced language skills? It wasn’t. Many mammals had slightly different versions of this gene. In bonobos, in particular, the human FOXP2 gene differed in only one place...0