A possible connection between click-languages and a coding variant in foxp2?

I apologize for the long pause after just having started the blog. There are many reasons for this but let's not delve into them.

So many things have happened during these few months so just covering the interesting topics of this period would constitute hundreds of blog posts.

Where should I start? I think I will start with a study that was widely reported and where another blog gave what I thought was some very interesting information but without drawing any hypothesis.

In february a study was published in nature about completely sequenced genomes of four khoi-sans and one bantu from southern africa. The bantu individual happened to be the revered arch-bishop Desmond Tutu which obviously created a lot of interesta and it was gracious of him to take part but scientifically the study of the khoisans could be said to be more important since they have been a little studied group and since they are not closely related with other more studied groups as is the case with the south-african bantus who are related to the well studied nigerian bantus.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7283/full/nature08795.html

I read a reflection on this study in john hawks weblog. He had read the available material on the net which did not include genotypes for new snps but included were a list of amino acid coding mutations compared to the human reference genome. He had noted that one of the khoisan had an amino acid mutation in the gene fox-p2.

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/genetics/brain/foxp2-bushman-variant-2010.html

This gene has been connected with language ability since people with speech disabilities have had mutations in it. Now a mutation does of course not have to lead to a disability it could also lead to an ability and my thought is that what constitues abilities and disabilities might vary between languages that are widely different.

John Hawks does raise the question whether this gene might be common in southern-africa but he doesn't put forward any hypotheses on what it might do and perhaps he is wise do to so considering the limited data. It was of course only found in one of the individuals.

However what did strike me at once as a layman was whether this mutation might have a connection with the click-languages? Either contributing to their emergence or being the result of countless of generations of that type of speech which perhaps gave it's bearer an even better mastery of the click sounds?

If either would be the case I think it would be a huge discovery at least from a human cultural standpoint.

A low frequencey today of the gene could be explained by admixture with the bantu or other peoples.

An important insight might then be that what counts as a disability for one language might be a great advantage when speaking a totally different language or put another way - "disabilities" or "abilities" might give rise to new languages. My country Sweden has many internationally succesful composers of songs and I have noticed that many of them are not that "verbally gifted" - at least when it comes to speeking indo-european languages (yes, swedish is indo-european). Perhaps they carry a mutation in fox-p2?