Something Bad Happened to Neanderthals 110,000 Years Ago—and It May Have Sealed Their Fate

DNA studies suggest that Neanderthals underwent a steep decline in genetic diversity around 110,000 years ago—a forbidding omen of the species’ disappearance approximately 70,000 years later. Recent research has reexamined this so-called “bottleneck” phenomenon by analyzing an unexpected feature: Neanderthal ears. An international research team, led by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona paleontologist Alessandro Urciuoli, studied Neanderthal semicircular ear canals—the three tiny tubes in the inner ear that control balance—across different time periods to detect significant changes in genetic diversity. Their analysis confirmed that our now-extinct relatives did, in fact, undergo a bottleneck event, as detailed in a study published February 20 in the journal Nature Communications. This genetic bottleneck (i.e. a loss of genetic diversity due to small population size) did not immediately result in the extinction of the Neanderthals, but it potentially set them in that fateful direction, ... Read full article.