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## The Question of Language and Communication
One of the things that the genome cannot tell us—one of the most humanly interesting things—is whether Denisova 11 or her parents used language.
This is not a question that paleogenomics can yet answer, and it may never be fully answerable from genetic evidence alone. The FOXP2 gene, sometimes called the “language gene,” was noted in early Neanderthal genomic research because the human version of this gene differs from other primates’ in ways that are associated with speech and language. Neanderthals carried the same human-type FOXP2 variants that modern humans carry, which some researchers interpreted as evidence for at least rudimentary language capacity in Neanderthals.
But FOXP2 is one gene among many that contribute to speech and language, and its presence does not establish that Neanderthals had language in the full sense that modern humans use it. The anatomy relevant to speech—the shape of the hyoid bone, the positioning of the larynx, the configuration of the vocal tract—can sometimes be inferred from skeletal evidence, but the specific traits associated with complex spoken language are difficult to read from bones. For Denisova 11, no relevant anatomy survives. The bone fragment is from a long bone, not from the skull or throat, and provides no information about any anatomical features relevant to speech.
Whether Neanderthals had language—and what kind of language—remains an open and actively debated question in paleoanthropology. The behavioral evidence (the range of their tool-making, the apparent use of pigments and ornaments, the burial of their dead) is consistent with cognitive capacities that might include or support language, but behavioral evidence does not straightforwardly translate into linguistic evidence. Denisovans, whose anatomy is almost entirely unknown, are even more opaque on this question.