WASHINGTON: An 18,000 year-old 'Hobbit' skeleton unearthed in Indonesia is a new species closely related to Homo sapiens, according to evidence released today.
Some scientists had theorised that the skeletal remains found on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 belonged to a pygmy or a microcephalic - a human with an abormally small skull.
But researchers from Florida State University (FSU), in Tallahassee, who examined a three-dimensional computer reconstruction of the small but well-formed brain of the hominid "classified it with normal humans".
"We have answered the people who contend that the 'Hobbit' is a microcephalic," said world-renowned palaeoneurologist Dean Falk, who is also chairwoman of FSU's anthropology department. FSU conducted the research with Indonesia's Centre for Archaeology and other international partners.
Her team's study of the skull, which included modelling both normal and microcephalic human brains, was published in today's issue of the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The computer model reproduced the surface of the brain, including its shape, grooves and vessels, revealing what Falk described as a "highly evolved brain".
The skeleton came to be known as 'the Hobbit' after the diminuitive characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's classic Lord of the Rings trilogy. The brain of the Hobbit - more accurately identified as Homo floresiensis after the island on which it was discovered - was compared to those of 10 normal humans and nine people suffering from microcephaly, a virus-induced disease which stunts the development of the brain.
The complete skeleton and skull, unearthed in a cave and measuring only 1.06 metres in length, ignited a raging controversy among anthropologists, who until then had believed that the extinction of the Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) 30,000 years ago left Homo sapiens as the only surviving human species.
Archaeologists had found sophisticated tools and evidence of a fire near the remains of the metre-tall adult female, who had a brain roughly one-third the size of a human from the same period. "People refused to believe that someone with that small a brain could make the tools. How could it be a sophisticated new species?" Falk said.
"It's the 64,000 dollar 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."
