Chatty Red-Haired Neanderthals?
New DNA evidence reveals that Neanderthals had genes for speech and red hair
November 09, 2007
Imagine trying to describe an entire culture based on a few skeletons. Now imagine that those bones are 40,000 years old. Sounds pretty tricky, huh?
But scientists in Spain and Germany are starting to do just that. These scientists are studying Neanderthals, a group of human-like creatures that lived in Europe and western Asia starting half-a-million years ago. They overlapped for a bit with the ancestors of modern-day humans. And it's our ancestors who probably made the Neanderthals go extinct 30,000 years ago.
Since the discovery of the first Neanderthal skeletons in Germany in the mid-19th century, most of what we know about these creatures has been based on fossils. From skeletal remains, we know they were short and had a large forehead and nose. From carved stones found near these skeletons, we know that they used tools for everyday work and for fighting.
But researchers wanted to know more. What did these Neanderthals really look like? How did they interact with each other? Could they talk like we do?
Scientists are beginning to figure these things out by looking at Neanderthals' DNA. Recently, they found that Neanderthals may have been able to talk to each other. And that at least a couple Neanderthals were redheads.
DNA can reveal this kind of information because it's the genetic blueprint for all living things. Just like looking at a blueprint can tell us about a building we've never seen, looking at a living creature's DNA can help tell us what the creature looked like. It can even give us clues to how it acted or whether it could speak.
Two years ago, researchers in Germany and the United States discovered intact DNA in a 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bone found in Croatia. They were able to recover a piece of DNA that was over a million letters (nucleotides) long. Despite some of the scary Neanderthal pictures you've seen, their DNA was 99.5% identical to ours!
Armed with these one million nucleotidesand a million questions to answer, scientists began trying to figure out what Neanderthals were really like.
![]() Using DNA from bones like these, scientists have found that Neanderthals may have been able to speak and that some had red hair. |
Chatty Neanderthals?
One burning question about Neanderthals is whether they could talk. By looking at fossils, scientists think that Neanderthals had the bones necessary for speech, including a special bone called the hyoid bone that helps the tongue move.
But could Neanderthals actually talk to each other? To figure this out, a group of scientists led by Svante Pääbo looked at a gene called FOXP2.
We know FOXP2 is an important gene for human speech because some people have a broken version of the FOXP2 gene and they have all sorts of trouble speaking. They can't control the movements of their mouth and tongue and they have problems understanding sentences and using correct grammar. (Click here to learn more.)
To see what the Neanderthal FOXP2 gene looked like, scientists studied a Neanderthal bone from Vindija Cave in Croatia. Because it had been buried in the ground for 40,000 years, this bone didn't have very much DNA left in it. To get around this problem, the scientists used a technique called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR.
PCR is just like photocopying DNA: it lets scientists make many copies of a specific piece of DNA starting from just a single copy. And once they have these copies, scientists can figure out the sequence of the DNA.
Using PCR, scientists found that the Neanderthal FOXP2 gene looked just like the human FOXP2 gene!
It turns out there are two differences in the FOXP2 gene between chimpanzees and humans. Scientists think this might help explain why humans can talk and chimps can't. And Neanderthals have the two human differences in their version of FOXP2.
Of course, there are many other genes involved in speech, so having a human-looking FOXP2 gene doesn't necessarily mean that Neanderthals could talk. But at the very least, Neanderthals were more likely to talk than chimpanzees!
Extreme Makeover: Redheaded Neanderthals
![]() Some Neanderthals may have been redheads too. |
More Information
- Did Neanderthals and humans interbreed?
- Contamination issue
- Inconsistencies in Neanderthal Genomic DNA Sequences
