The May issue of Scientific American includes an article by Katie Pollard, who may be best known for her work elucidating HAR1 in David Haussler's lab and who is now a biostatistician at the University of California, San Francisco. The article focuses on how comparative genomics is highlighting DNA that appears to occur only in humans, and Pollard recounts her and Haussler's reaction to learning about HAR1: "We yelled, 'Awesome!' in unison when we saw that HAR1 might be part of a gene new to science that is active in the brain."
Later in the article, she sums up, "These rapidly evolving, uniquely human sequences do point to a way forward. The story of what made us human is probably not going to focus on changes in our protein building blocks but rather on how evolution assembled these blocks in new ways by changing when and where in the body different genes turn on and off."