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Ok-Championship-2036 t1_it76q9i wrote

Reply to comment by hunnergunner in Do we know anything about Neanderthal language capabilities? by JoshRushing

Hi! Anthropologist here. When people talk about the FOXP2 gene, we believe the skill associated with it is actually sentence-construction. That means being able to put words together and "predict" what the end result will be. That might be distinctive wording or the cumulative meaning, etc. It's more about the mental math required to have a composite.

We know this because the FOXP2 gene is also used in tool-making, specifically knapping. Which is how you get spear heads and stone age tools. This process is very difficult and requires you to be able to "predict" how the stone will flake away. You have to be able to calculate angles visually and match your hand-eye coordination to achieve that result, many many times. It takes a while. This super-difficult skill is what we believe trained early homo groups (including Neanderthals) .

Lastly, we know that the culture of early homo groups was deeply spiritual. We know that shared identity was very important and that many early humans traveled in small family unit groups of 4-6 people. Early humans were prolific travelers and managed to explore the globe, leaving behind the nearly universal image of a religious carving. If I recall, it was an animal totem or some small vaguely humanoid sculpture, kind of like Venus of Willendorf. Basically, anthropologists never see anything that truly universal--because variety is the rule. But we found enough of these sculptures around the ancient world, all identical, all depicting shared group identity (humankind etc). This keepsake was traded globally, but also carried with many groups. From this, we know that their culture valued something even more than survival. We expect that shared communication and spirituality are the early adaptive skills of humans, which allowed us to assimilate the Neanderthals (genetically proven) and eventually take over the world.

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hunnergunner t1_it85jlm wrote

The evidence from tool making to infer that the gene is involved (among other things, of course) in sentence construction is quite indirect. To me, that's quite a stretch. Besides, there is more direct evidence that FOXP2 is not involved in sentence construction (assuming the linguistic interpretation of this term): members of the KE family with a mutation in FOXP2 are not impaired in interpreting sentence structures. Instead, the common symptom is verbal dyspraxia, related to motor control and thus speech production.

Honest question: how do you know that FOXP2 is used in tool making? What kind of evidence shows this?

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Ok-Championship-2036 t1_itbpu3f wrote

My source is a degree in cultural anthropology and archaeology. This is the way we are all taught.

The FOXP2 gene and tool making happen in the same part of the brain, specifically Broca's region. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16437554/ Archaeologists know that tool making is a primary skill for early neolithic and stone age homonids. They also know that hominid evolution was originally driven through adaptations related to grasping ability. This means catching bugs, branches, and tools. I don't have any of the textbooks in front of me right now, but our approach is working from the other direction, if that makes sense. Archaeologists didnt look to prove the FOX2P gene; that came after. We are looking at the actual remains and culture to see what actions drove evolution, adaptation, variation, and reproduction. What we've found is that tool making is an early behavior that was extremely advanced, difficult, and required a higher level of computation/communication. We can see evidence of toolmaking that explores the process of adopting this behavior, as well as the newer technologies that came from the results.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32995491/ (VanderVert 2020). The prominent role of the cerebellum in the social learning of the phonological loop in working memory: How language was adaptively built from cerebellar inner speech required during stone-tool making

Modern study: https://www.academia.edu/33081159/Human_brain_activity_during_stone_tool_production_tracing_the_evolution_of_cognition_and_language_2016_

Toolmaking tied to communication skills in Oldowan period https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774752/

Knapping process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDJ5gJxheRo

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hunnergunner t1_ithju22 wrote

Thanks. I agree that tool making is an impressive skill, which requires a lot of cognitive resources, some of which might indeed be linked to activation in Broca's area. But here, too, there is no one-to-one correspondence: Broca's area is involved in many behaviors, so the fact that both sentence construction and tool making activate it, does not mean that they rely on the same neural processes, let alone the same genes. The evidence for the link between FOXP2 and tool making would be stronger if there is a family of people with a FOXP2 mutation (like the KE family I mentioned) who are impaired in tool making (or, if such a family does not exist, there could be correlative evidence from population-level studies). Don't know whether such evidence exist, that's why I was asked about the type of evidence you rely on.

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MysteriousLeader6187 t1_it79xp4 wrote

Hello - I have a(n un) related question - has anyone given any thought to the idea that maybe the difference between Neanderthals and Humans is executive function? Especially since it's among the most recent evolutionary brain developments?

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Ok-Championship-2036 t1_itbqed5 wrote

This isn't how it works, sorry. There is no neurological separation between Neanderthal and homo sapiens. The reason for this is that we interbred relatively quickly and assimilated. This is true for the other "kinds" of early homonids. There really is no difference by any modern standards. Like spotted vs. brown cows. So neanderthals are fully a part of homo sapiens' ancestors and genetic material.

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