Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade.

ABSTRACT: 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

SUBMITTER: Urciuoli A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11842635 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature