New research on the inner ear morphology of Neanderthals and their ancestors challenges the widely accepted theory that Neanderthals originated after an evolutionary event that implied the loss of part of their genetic diversity 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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New findings on Neanderthal inner ear morphology suggest their origin may not involve a significant genetic bottleneck, challenging previous assumptions about their evolutionary history. doi.org/g85pp3
5/ Our results mix the cards of evolution once again and forces us to rethink the evolutionary processes that allowed the fixation of the very characteristic Neanderthal morphology!
Read more about this in our open access research paper!
4/ When comparing the morphological variation of late Neanderthals with that of Krapina (~120.000 years ago, Croatia) and Sima de los Huesos (~430.000 years ago, Spain) individuals, we expected that these populations (confined in time and space) would be much less variable. Surprise, they were not!
3/ The results for late Nanderthals sparked our curiosity to look back in time (>150.000 years ago), closer to othe origin of Neanderthals. Such old DNA is very difficult to obtain, which makes it diffcult to check whether it was a genetic bottleneck that initiated the Neanderthal speciation event.
2/ Thanks to ancient DNA analyses, we knew that late Neanderthals (those that can be most clearly identified as belonging the species) are not very genetically variable. Interestingly, our results detect them as very poorly variable in their semicircular canal shape!
1/ Did you know that the shape of the semicircular canals has a strong phylogenetic signal and that it can be used to assess genetic distances among species? This is why used it as a proxy to assess the variation of the Neanderthal clade at different times and evolutionary stages!
New research on the inner ear morphology of Neanderthals and their ancestors challenges the widely accepted theory that Neanderthals originated after an evolutionary event that implied the loss of part of their genetic diversity 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
