ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Human bony labyrinth is an indicator of population history and dispersal from Africa.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 30 papers.
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30 citing papers in PubMed, 80 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bony labyrinth morphology reveals deep population history and isolation among Homo sapiens in prehistoric northeastern Africa (44-3 ka).Nature communications · 2026Article
- µCT scanning effects on aDNA and a multi-step workflow for archaeological petrous portions.PloS one · 2026Article
- Morphometric study of the bony labyrinth of the inner ear in the European moles Talpa europaea, Talpa occidentalis, and Talpa aquitania.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- Rethinking Hominin Air Sac Loss in Light of Phylogenetically Meaningful Evidence.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Article
- Tracing Human Diversity in South America's Southern Cone: Linguistic, Morphometric, and Genetic Perspectives.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Petrous bones versus tooth cementum for genetic analysis of aged skeletal remains.International journal of legal medicine · 2025Article
- Convergent evolution in Afrotheria and non-afrotherians demonstrates high evolvability of the mammalian inner ear.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Sex determination by linear measurements of the bony labyrinth in cone-beam and computed tomography: a practical method.Forensic science, medicine, and pathology · 2024Article
- Insular dwarfism in horses from the Aegean Sea and the Japanese archipelago.Mammalian biology = Zeitschrift fur Saugetierkunde · 2024Article
- Article
- Ruminant inner ear shape records 35 million years of neutral evolution.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Size and shape of the semicircular canal of the inner ear: A new marker of pig domestication?Journal of experimental zoology. Part B, Molecular and developmental evolution · 2022Article
- Frontal sinuses and human evolution.Science advances · 2022Article
- Skull variation in Afro-Eurasian monkeys results from both adaptive and non-adaptive evolutionary processes.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Human semicircular canal form: Ontogenetic changes and variation of shape and size.Journal of anatomy · 2022Article
- Ancient Human Genomes and Environmental DNA from the Cement Attaching 2,000-Year-Old Head Lice Nits.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
- A minimally destructive protocol for DNA extraction from ancient teeth.Genome research · 2021Article
- Reassessment of the phylogenetic relationships of the late Miocene apesProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- A systematic investigation of human DNA preservation in medieval skeletons.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
10 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The dispersal of modern humans from Africa is now well documented with genetic data that track population history, as well as gene flow between populations. Phenetic skeletal data, such as cranial and pelvic morphologies, also exhibit a dispersal-from-Africa signal, which, however, tends to be blurred by the effects of local adaptation and in vivo phenotypic plasticity, and that is often deteriorated by postmortem damage to skeletal remains. These complexities raise the question of which skeletal structures most effectively track neutral population history. The cavity system of the inner ear (the so-called bony labyrinth) is a good candidate structure for such analyses. It is already fully formed by birth, which minimizes postnatal phenotypic plasticity, and it is generally well preserved in archaeological samples. Here we use morphometric data of the bony labyrinth to show that it is a surprisingly good marker of the global dispersal of modern humans from Africa. Labyrinthine morphology tracks genetic distances and geography in accordance with an isolation-by-distance model with dispersal from Africa. Our data further indicate that the neutral-like pattern of variation is compatible with stabilizing selection on labyrinth morphology. Given the increasingly important role of the petrous bone for ancient DNA recovery from archaeological specimens, we encourage researchers to acquire 3D morphological data of the inner ear structures before any invasive sampling. Such data will constitute an important archive of phenotypic variation in present and past populations, and will permit individual-based genotype-phenotype comparisons.
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