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Ancient DNA and language evolution: a special section
Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2018-01-01 , DOI: 10.1093/jole/lzx024
Antonio Benítez-Burraco , Dan Dediu

About a year or so ago, prompted by what seemed (and still does) to be a flood of new methods and findings stemming from the extraction, analysis and interpretation of more and more ancient genomes, both from archaic (Neanderthals and Denisovans) and modern (but long dead) humans, we thought that it is becoming necessary to have a collection of papers looking into the implications for language origins and evolution. Thus, the idea of a special issue on ancient DNA emerged, we dully contacted groups and individual scientists working on these issues, and we soon had an impressive lineup of contributors and contributions. However, due to the extremely dynamic nature of the field and the multiple constraints to which our contributors have to face, we decided to rather have a continuously running series of ‘special sections’ containing contributions touching upon these issues as they arrive, instead of waiting for all contributions to be assembled into a dedicated ‘special issue’. The first four contributions follow, ranging from setting the wider background to focusing on specific genes, and touching not only on ancient DNA but also on genetic data from living humans and even on the archeological and paleoanthropological record. The papers originate from well-known groups and scientists and, despite their diversity, they contribute to setting the foundations for the proper, contextualized, and nuanced interpretation of the new findings that are bound to continue coming, as well as suggesting new methods, data sources and interpretative frameworks that should help our field advance. We begin with Hayley Susan Mountford and Dianne Newbury, geneticists with long-term interests in language at Oxford Brookes University in the UK, whose ‘The Genomic Landscape of Language Disorders: Insights into Evolution’ provides the necessary background for discussing the genetic foundations of language and speech and the interpretation of data from ancient genomes. Their conclusion that ‘[w]e are only just beginning to unravel the highly complex developmental processes that underlie speech in modern humans, and should be extremely cautious in extrapolating any findings into hominins’, far from being pessimistic, must instead form the backbone for any attempts at linking genetics (not only ancient) to theories of language origins and evolution. In ‘What aDNA can (and cannot) tell us about the emergence of language and speech’, Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall, a molecular systematics/comparative genomics expert and a palaeoanthropologist with a long history of work on language origins with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, join forces to discuss the questions that ancient DNA may (and may not) answer when it comes to language origins and evolution, to militate for properly placing such findings against the background provided by paleoanthropology and archeology, and to propose an actual method for identifying genes that may be involved in the evolution of language and speech. ‘SRGAP2 and the gradual evolution of the modern human language faculty’, written by a team of linguists and cognitive sciences from the University of Barcelona with important contributions to language evolution, focuses on a specific gene, SRGAP2, and argue, based on multiple lines of evidence including its evolutionary history and the molecular pathways it is involved in, that it may have played a role in the evolution of vocal

中文翻译:

古代 DNA 和语言进化:一个特殊的部分

大约一年前,由于对越来越古老的基因组(包括古代(尼安德特人和丹尼索瓦人)和现代人)的提取、分析和解释产生的大量新方法和发现的推动,似乎(现在仍然如此) (但早已死去)人类,我们认为有必要收集一系列研究语言起源和进化影响的论文。因此,出现了关于古代 DNA 的特刊的想法,我们迟钝地联系了致力于这些问题的团体和个别科学家,我们很快就拥有了令人印象深刻的贡献者和贡献者阵容。然而,由于该领域极其动态的性质以及我们的贡献者必须面对的多重限制,我们决定宁可有一系列持续运行的“特刊”,其中包含涉及这些问题的稿件,而不是等待所有稿件汇集到一个专门的“特刊”中。接下来是前四项贡献,从设置更广泛的背景到关注特定基因,不仅涉及古代 DNA,还涉及活人的基因数据,甚至考古和古人类学记录。这些论文来自知名团体和科学家,尽管它们具有多样性,但它们有助于为对必将继续出现的新发现进行适当、情境化和细致入微的解释奠定基础,并提出新的方法、数据应该有助于我们领域进步的来源和解释框架。我们从英国牛津布鲁克斯大学对语言有长期兴趣的遗传学家 Hayley Susan Mountford 和 Dianne Newbury 开始,他们的“语言障碍的基因组景观:对进化的洞察”为讨论语言的遗传基础提供了必要的背景以及语音和古代基因组数据的解释。他们的结论是,“[w]e 才刚刚开始解开现代人类语言背后的高度复杂的发育过程,在将任何发现外推到古人类时应该非常谨慎”,这绝不是悲观的,而是必须成为任何将遗传学(不仅是古代)与语言起源和进化理论联系起来的尝试。在“什么 aDNA 可以(也不能)告诉我们语言和言语的出现”中,Rob DeSalle 和 Ian Tattersall,分子系统学/比较基因组学专家和古人类学家在纽约美国自然历史博物馆的语言起源方面有着悠久的工作历史,他们联手讨论古代 DNA 可能(也可能不会)的问题) 回答语言起源和进化问题,有助于将这些发现正确地置于古人类学和考古学提供的背景下,并提出一种实际方法来识别可能参与语言和语音进化的基因。由巴塞罗那大学语言学家和认知科学团队撰写的“SRGAP2 和现代人类语言教师的逐渐进化”,对语言进化有重要贡献,重点关注特定基因 SRGAP2,并认为,
更新日期:2018-01-01
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