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

 

The seventh journal club meeting, as part of the GAbridge project, was held on Tuesday, May 13th. At the meeting, PhD candidate Ivana Keršić presented 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.