Genetic study confirms: First dogs came from East Asia

In NOT A CHIMP I discuss the evidence that humans have self-domesticated. One animal model of the process is dogs. The suggestion is that, rather than humans cultivating wild wolves and domesticating them, the wolves did it themselves through a long process of commensalism around early human encampments. But where on the globe did that process begin and what type of wolf best represents the dog ancestor? There is a long-running battle, based on genetics and archaeology, between researchers who believe the Middle East was the cradle of dog domestication and those who prefer East Asia. Here, Peter Savolainen, from Sweden, presents strong genetic evidence that all dogs emanated from an area of wolf domestication in what they call the ASY region - Asia south of the Yangtze - in southern China. The article discusses no dates and does not debate the commensalism versus purposeful selection argument for how dogs acquired their domesticated traits.

'Language gene' speeds learning

In NOT A CHIMP I detail the discovery of the FOXP2 gene and its role in human language and the oro-facial muscular movements required to produce intelligible speech. Scientists at the Max Planck in Leipzig have been looking ever since for the answer to precisely how it works and have recently reported work on mice that have had the human version of the FOXP2 gene "knocked into" them. They prove to be better learners of maze-negotiating tasks than normal mice. But how can this lead to language? The team seem to be suggesting that human FOXP2 allows humans to learn the complex muscular movements that form speech - but it is hard to understand this, because, as Faraneh Vargha-Khadem (the scientist who has done all the work on articulation difficulties in families with FOXP2 mutation and speech and learning difficulties) says - such muscular control is involuntary. I suspect that further work on the basal ganglia will get us closer to the answer.