A new paper the Ramachandran Lab collaborated on (Sohini and Julia Palacios are coauthors) is out in Cell, led by collaborators Elizabeth Atkinson and Brenna Henn! The paper is entitled “No Evidence for Recent Selection at FOXP2 among Diverse Human Populations”, and also involved Brown University colleagues Ashley Webb and postdoc Amanda Audesse. The work uses sequence data and diverse human samples to reanalyze so-called “language gene” FOXP2, previously thought to have undergone a selective sweep in the modern human lineage. We show that there is not evidence for this, revising the history of how humans acquired language. This work was funded by Sohini’s NIH R01 GM118652, on which Brenna is a co-investigator.
Other coverage of the paper can be found at Nature News and in Cell’s press release.
Congratulations to all the authors!