[asa] Anthropologist Confirms 'Hobbit' Indeed A Separate (Human) Species

Item of interest. ~ Janice

Anthropologist Confirms 'Hobbit' Indeed A Separate (Human) Species
Science Daily ^ | 1-29-2007 | Florida State University
Posted on 01/29/2007 7:13:17 PM EST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1775786/posts

Anthropologist Confirms 'Hobbit' Indeed A Separate Species

Science Daily ­ After the skeletal remains of an
18,000-year-old, Hobbit-sized human were
discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in
2003, some scientists thought that the specimen
must have been a pygmy or a microcephalic -- a
human with an abnormally small skull.

Not so, said Dean Falk, a world-renowned
paleoneurologist and chair of Florida State
University's anthropology department, who along
with an international team of experts created
detailed maps of imprints left on the ancient
hominid's braincase and concluded that the
so-called Hobbit was actually a new species closely related to Homo sapiens.

Now after further study, Falk is absolutely
convinced that her team was right and that the
species cataloged as LB1, Homo floresiensis, is
definitely not a human born with microcephalia --
a somewhat rare pathological condition that still
occurs today. Usually the result of a
double-recessive gene, the condition is
characterized by a small head and accompanied by some mental retardation.

"We have answered the people who contend that the
Hobbit is a microcephalic," Falk said of her
team's study of both normal and microcephalic
human brains published in the Jan. 29 issue of
the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States).

The debate stemmed from the fact that
archaeologists had found sophisticated tools and
evidence of a fire near the remains of the
3-foot-tall adult female with a brain roughly
one-third the size of a contemporary human.

"People refused to believe that someone with that
small of a brain could make the tools. How could
it be a sophisticated new species?"

But that's exactly what it is, according to Falk,
whose team had previously created a "virtual
endocast" from a three-dimensional computer model
of the Hobbit's braincase, which reproduces the
surface of the brain including its shape,
grooves, vessels and sinuses. The endocasts
revealed large parts of the frontal lobe and
other anatomical features consistent with higher cognitive processes.

"LB1 has a highly evolved brain," she said. "It
didn't get bigger, it got rewired and
reorganized, and that's very interesting."

In this latest study, the researchers compared
3-D, computer-generated reconstructions of nine
microcephalic modern human brains and 10 normal
modern human brains. They found that certain
shape features completely separate the two groups
and that Hobbit classifies with normal humans
rather than microcephalic humans in these
features. In other ways, however, Hobbit's brain
is unique, which is consistent with its attribution to a new species.

Comparison of two areas in the frontal lobe, the
temporal lobe and the back of the brain show the
Hobbit brain is nothing like a microcephalic's
and is advanced in a way that is different from
living humans. In fact, the LB1 brain was the
"antithesis" of the microcephalic brain,
according to Falk, a finding the researchers hope
puts this part of the Hobbit controversy to rest.

It's time to move on to other important
questions, Falk said, namely the origin of this
species that co-existed at the same time that
Homo sapiens was presumed to be the Earth's sole human inhabitant.

"It's the $64,000 question: Where did it come
from?" she said. "Who did it descend from, who
are its relatives, and what does it say about
human evolution? That's the real excitement about this discovery."

Falk's co-authors on the PNAS paper, "Brain shape
in human microcephalics and Homo floresiensis,"
are Charles Hildebolt, Kirk Smith and Fred Prior
of the Washington University School of Medicine
in St. Louis; M.J. Morwood of the University of
New England in Australia; Thomas Sutikna, E.
Wayhu Saptomo and Jatmiko of the Indonesian
Centre for Archaeology in Indonesia; Herwig Imhof
of the Medical University of Vienna, Austria; and
Horst Seidler of the University of Vienna, Austria.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news
release issued by Florida State University.

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Received on Mon Jan 29 22:10:38 2007