RT Journal Article
T1 Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade
A1 Urciuoli, Alessandro
A1 Martínez, Ignacio
AB Revealing the evolutionary processes which resulted in the derived morphologies that characterize the Neanderthal clade has been an important task for paleoanthropologists. One critical method to quantify evolutionary changes in the morphology of hominin populations is through evaluating morphological phenotypic diversity (i.e., disparity) in phylogenetically informative bones as a close proxy to neutral evolutionary processes. The goal of this study is to quantify the degree of disparity in the Neanderthal clade. We hypothesize that a reduction in bony labyrinth disparity is indicative of the underlying genetic variation resulting from bottleneck events. We apply a deformation-based geometric morphometric approach to investigate semicircular canal and vestibule shape of a chronologically broad sample of individuals belonging to the Neanderthal lineage. Our results identify a significant reduction in disparity after the start of Marine Isotope Stage 5 supporting our hypothesis of a late bottleneck, possibly leading to the derived morphology of Late Pleistocene Neanderthals.
PB Nature Research
YR 2025
FD 2025-02-20
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/118881
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/118881
LA eng
NO Urciuoli, A., Martínez, I., Quam, R., Arsuaga, J. L., Keeling, B. A., Diez-Valero, J., & Conde-Valverde, M. (2025). Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade. Nature Communications, 16(1), 972. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56155-8
NO MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE
NO European Union NextGenerationEU (A.U.)
DS Docta Complutense
RD 11 abr 2025