In The Inheritors, Willliam Golding’s second novel, Neanderthals utter only a few short words and think entirely with images. A family is disturbed by the arrival of people who are not like them, and who talk in sentences. The two groups clash and in the end the only Neanderthal to survive is an infant, stolen by the newcomers – that is, us, Homo sapiens.

The idea that language gave our ancestors the edge over Neanderthals, leading to their extinction 40,000 years ago, remains strong. New research though suggests it may be wrong. Modern language skills, it seems, were present hundreds of thousands of years ago, before Neanderthals and sapiens had evolved. Linguistically, Neanderthals might even have been a little more advanced than us. So why was it Neanderthals and not sapiens who disappeared? Why has the biological basis for language apparently not changed for so long? And if language wasn’t the key factor in Neanderthal extinction, what was?

Let’s start with the science. Genetic research published a few years ago identified what scientists called HAQERs (human ancestor quickly evolved regions) – areas in the human genome which evolved particularly fast. HAQERs are not genes themselves, but between the separation of the chimpanzee and human lines six or seven million years ago, and the split 600,000 years ago that resulted in Neanderthals and sapiens, they controlled genes which led to rapid changes in the........

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