Every human being reading this right now shares ancient…

Every human being reading this right now shares ancient DNA with Neanderthals. And that shared DNA may be the very reason you can read these words. A landmark study published in Science Advances just traced the genetic origins of human language ability back further than anyone thought possible — to before modern humans and Neanderthals even split from a common ancestor. The key discovery: tiny genetic regulatory regions called HAQERs. HAQERs represent less than a tenth of a percent of the genome but drive roughly 200 times more impact on language ability than any other genomic region. These are not genes. They are regulatory regions, acting like volume controls for genes involved in brain development. The analysis reveal