2/2 Use synchrotron CT & join me in unravelling the biomechanics of the organ of hearing! MSc in biomechanics, (paleo)anthropology, auditory physiology reqr. Find more details in the call! Deadline: Apr 20, 2025. #PhD #Palaeontology #Evolution #Zurich

🧵 1/2 PhD Opportunity! Join my new HEAR lab
@ the University of Zurich (Sept 2025) to research hominin hearing evolution. 4yr contract, SNSF funded. Focus: cochlear anatomy, computational modeling, fossil hearing. shorturl.at/ohH44

@a-urciuoli.bsky.social is looking for a PhD student to study hominin hearing evolution! Ears are great (I'm not biased at all): uzhcareer.ch/de/jobs/deta...

Tracing the Genetic Echo of Neanderthals: A Bottleneck in Evolution New research challenges long-held assumptions about the origins and decline of our closest relatives

A very nice way to dissect a paper! If you are on a bus/train/airplane and are willing to hear some interesting 15 scientific minutes, buckle up and play this podcast in your earbuds.

The inner ear of Neanderthals reveals clues about their enigmatic origin 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.

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

Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade - Nature Communications In some structures, morphological phenotypic disparity can reflect underlying genetic variation. Here, the authors apply deformation-based geometric morphometrics to the Neanderthal clade bony labyrin...

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!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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...