Researchers from the Rockefeller University, New York have discovered that a protein variant found only in humans may have helped shape the emergence of spoken language.
Publishing their research in Nature Communications, the researchers generated mice carrying the human variant of the NOVA1 gene and found that it altered their speech as they called to each other, producing more complex chirps than normal mice.
The NOVA1 protein is an RNA-binding protein in the brain known to be crucial to neural development.