Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and
processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research …

The study of language evolution, and human cognitive evolution more generally, has often
been ridiculed as unscientific, but in fact it differs little from many other disciplines that …

Here we conducted a large-scale genetic association analysis of educational attainment in a
sample of approximately 1.1 million individuals and identify 1,271 independent genome …

The past few years have witnessed a revolution in our ability to obtain DNA from ancient
humans. This important new data has added to our knowledge from archaeology and …

The granular dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is an evolutionary specialization of
primates that is centrally involved in cognition. We assessed more than 600,000 single …

Modern humans have large and globular brains that distinguish them from their extinct
Homo relatives. The characteristic globularity develops during a prenatal and early postnatal …

Although Neandertal sequences that persist in the genomes of modern humans have been
identified in Eurasians, comparable studies in people whose ancestors hybridized with both …

It is usually assumed that modern language is a recent phenomenon, coinciding with the
emergence of modern humans themselves. Many assume as well that this is the result of a …

Denisovans, a group of now extinct humans who lived in Eastern Eurasia in the Middle and
Late Pleistocene, were first identified from DNA sequences just over a decade ago. Only ten …

Any account of “what is special about the human brain”(Passingham 2008) must specify the
neural basis of our unique ability to produce speech and delineate how these remarkable …