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Story summary
- Jacob Michaelson and colleagues published an Advances study describing HAQERs, tiny genomic regions that influence language.
- HAQERs comprise 0.1% of the genome and function as “volume knobs” for the FOXP2 gene.
- The study linked HAQER variation to language ability in 350 students and over 100,000 participants from the UK Biobank and SPARK cohorts.
- Researchers propose that a trade-off with a narrow pelvis halted HAQER evolution, leaving no single language gene.
