ago. It is very tempting therefore to call FOXP2 a 'language gene', but nearly everyone regards this as oversimplified. Are individuals afflicted with this mutation really languageimpaired or do they just have trouble speaking? On top of that, despite great advances in neuroscience, we currently know very little about how genes determine the growth and structure of brains or how the structure of the brain determines the ability to use language. Nevertheless, if we are ever going to learn
more about how the human language ability evolved, the most promising evidence will probably come from the human genome, which preserves so much of our species' history. The challenge for the future will be to decode it.