ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
No known hominin species matches the expected dental morphology of the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Tooth morphology across patterns of third molar agenesis: a geometric morphometric study in a French orthodontic population.Clinical oral investigations · 2026Article
- Article
- Shape variation in modern human upper premolars.PloS one · 2024Article
- Morphological and phylogeographic evidence for budding speciation: an example in hominins.Biology letters · 2021Article
- The dental proteome of Homo antecessor.Nature · 2020Article
- Deciphering African late middle Pleistocene hominin diversity and the origin of our species.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Dental evolutionary rates and its implications for the Neanderthal-modern human divergence.Science advances · 2019Article
- Article
- Tooth crown tissue proportions and enamel thickness in Early Pleistocene Homo antecessor molars (Atapuerca, Spain).PloS one · 2018Article
- Reconstructing human population history from dental phenotypes.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Brain enlargement and dental reduction were not linked in hominin evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Dating placentalia: Morphological clocks fail to close the molecular fossil gap.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2016Article
- Gene networks, occlusal clocks, and functional patches: new understanding of pattern and process in the evolution of the dentition.Odontology · 2015Review
- The human semicircular canals orientation is more similar to the bonobos than to the chimpanzees.PloS one · 2014Article
- Discontinuity of human presence at Atapuerca during the early Middle Pleistocene: a matter of ecological competition?PloS one · 2014Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
A central problem in paleoanthropology is the identity of the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans ([N-MH]LCA). Recently developed analytical techniques now allow this problem to be addressed using a probabilistic morphological framework. This study provides a quantitative reconstruction of the expected dental morphology of the [N-MH]LCA and an assessment of whether known fossil species are compatible with this ancestral position. We show that no known fossil species is a suitable candidate for being the [N-MH]LCA and that all late Early and Middle Pleistocene taxa from Europe have Neanderthal dental affinities, pointing to the existence of a European clade originated around 1 Ma. These results are incongruent with younger molecular divergence estimates and suggest at least one of the following must be true: (i) European fossils and the [N-MH]LCA selectively retained primitive dental traits; (ii) molecular estimates of the divergence between Neanderthals and modern humans are underestimated; or (iii) phenotypic divergence and speciation between both species were decoupled such that phenotypic differentiation, at least in dental morphology, predated speciation.
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