Hallo allemaal,

Ik kwam het volgende artikel tegen, misschien interessant voor WPZ leden:

Were neandertal and modern human cranial differences produced by
natural selection or genetic drift ?
Timothy D. Weaver, Charles C. Roseman, Chris B. Stringer.
Journal of Human Evolution 53(2): 135 – 145, August 2007.

Abstract
Most evolutionary explanations for cranial differences between
Neandertals and modern humans emphasize adaptation by natural
selection. Features of the crania of Neandertals could be adaptations
to the glacial climate of Pleistocene Europe or to the high mechanical
strains produced by habitually using the front teeth as tools, while
those of modern humans could be adaptations for articulate speech
production. A few researchers have proposed non-adaptive explanations.
These stress that isolation between Neandertal and modern human
populations would have lead to cranial diversification by genetic
drift (chance changes in the frequencies of alleles at genetic loci
contributing to variation in cranial morphology). Here we use a
variety of statistical tests founded on explicit predictions from
quantitative- and population-genetic theory to show that genetic drift
can explain cranial differences between Neandertals and modern humans.
These tests are based on thirty-seven standard crania
l measurements from a sample of 2524 modern humans from 30 populations
and 20 Neandertal fossils. As a further test, we compare our results
for modern human cranial measurements with those for a genetic dataset
consisting of 377 microsatellites typed for a sample of 1056 modern
humans from 52 populations. We conclude that rather than requiring
special adaptive accounts, Neandertal and modern human crania may
simply represent two outcomes from a vast space of random evolutionary
possibilities


groeten, Hanneke