ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Unconstrained cranial evolution in Neandertals and modern humans compared to common chimpanzees.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolutionary drivers of encephalization and facial reduction in the genus Homo.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Evolving a Field: Can Evolutionary Theory Provide What the Study of Human Evolution Requires?American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Review
- Automatic landmarking identifies new loci associated with face morphology and implicates Neanderthal introgression in human nasal shape.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Reconstructing cranial evolution in an extinct hominin.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Evidence of different climatic adaptation strategies in humans and non-human primates.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- The African ape-like foot ofeLife · 2019Article
- No Country for Oldowan Men: Emerging Factors in Language Evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Review
- Hominoid intraspecific cranial variation mirrors neutral genetic diversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Human bony labyrinth is an indicator of population history and dispersal from Africa.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- The origin and evolution of Homo sapiens.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A variety of lines of evidence support the idea that neutral evolutionary processes (genetic drift, mutation) have been important in generating cranial differences between Neandertals and modern humans. But how do Neandertals and modern humans compare with other species? And how do these comparisons illuminate the evolutionary processes underlying cranial diversification? To address these questions, we used 27 standard cranial measurements collected on 2524 recent modern humans, 20 Neandertals and 237 common chimpanzees to estimate split times between Neandertals and modern humans, and between Pan troglodytes verus and two other subspecies of common chimpanzee. Consistent with a neutral divergence, the Neandertal versus modern human split-time estimates based on cranial measurements are similar to those based on DNA sequences. By contrast, the common chimpanzee cranial estimates are much lower than DNA-sequence estimates. Apparently, cranial evolution has been unconstrained in Neandertals and modern humans compared with common chimpanzees. Based on these and additional analyses, it appears that cranial differentiation in common chimpanzees has been restricted by stabilizing natural selection. Alternatively, this restriction could be due to genetic and/or developmental constraints on the amount of within-group variance (relative to effective population size) available for genetic drift to act on.
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