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

Alessandro Urciuoli (), Ignacio Martínez, Rolf Quam, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Brian A. Keeling, Julia Diez-Valero and Mercedes Conde-Valverde ()
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Alessandro Urciuoli: 08193 Cerdanyola del Vallès
Ignacio Martínez: 28871 Alcalá de Henares
Rolf Quam: 28871 Alcalá de Henares
Juan Luis Arsuaga: Centro Mixto (UCM-ISCIII) de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos
Brian A. Keeling: 28871 Alcalá de Henares
Julia Diez-Valero: 28871 Alcalá de Henares
Mercedes Conde-Valverde: 28871 Alcalá de Henares

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: 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 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.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56155-8

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