Report of the seventh GAbridge project journal club, May 13th, 2025

The seventh journal club meeting as part of the GAbridge project took place on Tuesday, May 13th, 2025. Two papers with different themes and methodologies were presented by Ivana Keršić at the journal club. In the paper "Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade" (Urciuoli et al., 2025), the authors present the idea of ​​employing the diversity of the inner ear bony labyrinth morphology as a 'proxy' for genetic diversity when studying the evolutionary history of Neanderthals. The idea and foundation of the work is creative, and it started a discussion on how the authors present their hypotheses in the work and whether the geometric-morphometric approach to the analysis of such a bone element makes sense as a substitute for genetic data in diversity analysis. The second paper, "A Million Years of Mammoth Mitogenome Evolution" (Chacón-Duque et al., 2025) is closer to the group's work in terms of topic and methodology. The authors explain and apply an adapted approach of dating samples that are beyond the time limits of carbon-14 dating, using molecular dating on Pleistocene mammoth remains. The possibilities of such an approach were discussed and how this methodology could be applied to the samples from our project.