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TEXT ONE If you found yourself in a cocktail bar with a Neanderthal man, what would he say? A good conversation is one of the great joys of being human, but it is not clear just how far back in the hominid lineage the ability to use language stretches. The question of when grunts and yelps turned into words and phrases is a tricky one. One way of trying to answer it is to look in the fossil record for evidence about what modern humanitys closest relatives could do. Svante P??bo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and his colleagues have done just that. Dr P??bo is an expert in extracting and interpreting the DNA of fossils. As he reports in the latest issue of Current Biology, he and his team have worked their magic on a gene called FOXP2 found in Neanderthal remains from northern Spain. The reason for picking this particular gene is that it is the only one known so far to have a direct connection with speech. In 1990, a family with an inherited speech disorder known as verbal dyspraxia drew the attention of genetics researchers. Those researchers identified a mutation in FOXP2 as the cause of the dyspraxia. Since then FOXP2 has been the subject of intensive study. It has been linked to the production of birdsong and the ultrasonic musings of mice. It is a conservative type, not changing much from species to species. But it has undergone two changes since humans split from chimpanzees 6m years ago, and some researchers believe these changes played a crucial role in the development of speech and language. If these changes are common to modern humans and Neanderthals, they must predate the separation of the line leading to Homo sapiens from the one leading to Homo neanderthalensis. Dr P??bos research suggests precisely that: the FOXP2 genes from modern humans and Neanderthals are essentially the same. To the extent that the gene enables language, it enables it in both species. There has been much speculation about Neanderthals abili