The psychological importance of the fact that a huge number of populations of the world have archaic admixture is probably greater than the fact that more populations have been discovered to have ancient admixture from different sources. The destructive ideologies of racism are caught up in the notion of purity, and deprived of that have a hard time reaching a boiling point.

I went back and looked over the comments, and I think the discrepancy arose because we are using “late-term” differently. My comment uses “late-term” to refer to abortions done in the second and third trimester. Yours defines “late-term” to mean abortions done 19 weeks after conception, which is toward the end of the second trimester. If your definition is the commonly accepted one then I apologize for using the term carelessly.

Gonzales v. Carhart is here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-380.ZO.html The exact quote is: “Between 85 and 90 percent of the approximately 1.3 million abortions performed each year in the United States take place in the first three months of pregnancy, which is to say in the first trimester.”

I respect your blog and have no desire to show disrespect by bringing back up a subject whose discussion you’ve proscribed, but I also don’t want people to think I just make up inflammatory numbers. So, as my last comment on this issue and thread if you’ll permit it:

@Emerson – I got my figure from the Supreme Court’s holding in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), which relied on figures from Planned Parenthood.

Again, my last comment here.

Miriam’s voice disagrees(/d):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZA4TkjbtE

At any rate, I think vowels are fine, we all raise our vocal range when shouting (especially over noise; while acoustically, lower tones are more appropriate over extreme distances). And I agree that click sounds are a bit more clandestine and have been used in the context of animals (but not as a full-fledged language) elsewhere for millennia. As such, I also highly doubt there are any specific genetic links for sound production: so far, research seems to show that any known language can easily be learned by newborns regardless of genetic background.

For using at distance, shouting warnings, etc, I’d guess the vowels come into play much more.

I am wondering if this can be a sequencing error? Because if it’s not, it’s huge. For it is not just some non-standard SNP but a full blown missense mutation, a potentially drastic one, too – L558P. That position is in the forkhead DNA binding domain, close to protein-DNA interface, likely to be critical for maintaining local structure. It seems to be absolutely conserved in mammals (I checked: monkeys, elephants, hamsters). All that in a protein that has only three amino acid residue differences between mouse and human and it’s either a sequence error or a mutation that ought to have huge functional consequences.

For what it’s worth, Paul du Chaillu describes at least one “species” of chimp still not recognized by biologists in his 1861 Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (an interesting read). Burroughs relied on this and other accounts by early explorers for the backgrounds of his first Tarzan novels.

Down with human exceptionalism! Chances are that if any wide-ranging species were to be studied as exhaustively as H.sapiens, all kinds of weird things would be found in its evolutionary history. This is life. Life is always complicated. And any taxonomy is always imperfect.

Dunno if it’s relevant, but plenty of people (self included) use click sounds when calling domesticated animals. Perhaps because (as @27 says) they travel further.

@27, interesting speculation. One thing to do would be to show that native South Africans do indeed have an easier time producing these sounds, controlling for whether an individual’s first language has clicks or not. (Tough experiment to perform, probably.)

I’d imagine that Clicks travel over larger distances?

The native Canarians used a whistling language called Silbo, with which they could “talk” from one mountain to another.

It’s interesting that one of the San genomes had a non-standard FOXP2 SNP. Which prompted me a year ago to speculate that the standard human FOXP2 introgressed from Neanderthals. But maybe it’s the case that some SAN have an archaic introgressed FOXP2. Or is this mutation confer some advantage in producing clicks?

@23, see first comment. (Unless someone else had the same idea.)

@18, clicks could still be transmitted even if there were language loss. For example, if all Khoisan languages die out in the next century, the clicks will likely persist in Xhosa and other Bantu languages. But your other point, about the difference between the Bantu-Pygmy and the Bantu-Khoisan relationships, makes sense to me (and maybe helps to explain why Pygmies lost their languages while Khoisan didn’t).