Very interesting article in Medical Express which extends our knowledge of the widespread effects of the FOXP2 "speech articulation" gene throughout the animal kingdom. Erich Jarvis (better known for his research on bird vocalisation) has been looking at FOXP2 heterozygotes in mice and has shown that they suffer from ultrasonic vocalisation defects compared with normal wild-type mice. Clearly, FOXP2 has important effects on brain wiring for speech / vocalisation that greatly precede the emergence of human language. Here is a link to the source paper.