Washington: A new study has discovered a crucial component of the origin of language in humans with the help of gene identified in fruit flies.
Troy Zars, associate professor of biological sciences in the College of Arts and Science at MU said that one effective way of uncovering the root of language development is to study language impairment disorders that are genetically based.
He further explained that in 2007, researchers discovered that a gene in the fruit fly genome was very similar to the human version of the Forkhead Box P (FoxP) gene and in the latest study, it was determined that it plays a major role in behavior-based, operant and learning.
The results suggested that one of the roots of language could be placed 500 million years ago to an ancestor who had evolved the ability to learn by trial and error.
The study `Drosophila FoxP mutants are deficient in operant self-learning` is published in PLOS One.
