Neandertals

A hierarchical Bayesian framework accommodates intraspecific and interspecific variation in multivariate traits

Phylogenetic comparative methods are a critical tool in biology, providing the framework to test evolutionary hypotheses of phenotypic diversification. Accommodating intraspecific variation in these analyses is critical for accurate evolutionary inference, but current multivariate methods either assume traits evolve independently or that all taxa share the same intraspecific covariance structure. Violations of these assumptions can produce biased estimates of evolutionary parameters.