title: Virtual ancestor reconstruction: Revealing the ancestor of modern humans and Neandertals.
abstract: The timing and geographic origin of the common ancestor of modern humans and Neandertals remain controversial. A poor Pleistocene hominin fossil record and the evolutionary complexities introduced by dispersals and regionalisation of lineages have fuelled taxonomic uncertainty, while new ancient genomic data have raised completely new questions. Here, we use maximum likelihood and 3D geometric morphometric methods to predict possible morphologies of the last common ancestor of modern humans and Neandertals from a simplified, fully resolved phylogeny. We describe the fully rendered 3D shapes of the predicted ancestors of humans and Neandertals, and assess their similarity to individual fossils or populations of fossils of Pleistocene age. Our results support models of an Afro-European ancestral population in the Middle Pleistocene (Homo heidelbergensis sensu lato) and further predict an African origin for this ancestral population.
authors: The Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Street, Cambridge CB2 1QH, United Kingdom; UMR 7268 ADES, Aix-Marseille Université/EFS/CNRS, Faculté de Médecine - Secteur Nord, CS80011, Bd Pierre Dramard, 13344 Marseille, France. Electronic address: am2099@cam.ac.uk.
authors: Aurélien
authors: A
authors: Mounier
authors: The Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Street, Cambridge CB2 1QH, United Kingdom; Turkana Basin Institute, Kenya.
authors: Marta
authors: M
authors: Mirazón Lahr
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D005580:Fossils / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D015186:Hominidae / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D059125:Neanderthals / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D010802:Phylogeny; D012886:Skull / Q000033:anatomy & histology*
keywords: 3D geometric morphometrics; H. heidelbergensis; H. neanderthalensis; H. sapiens; Last common ancestor; Maximum likelihood