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WASHINGTON: Scientific evidence released Monday
supports the theory that a 18,000-year-old “Hobbit” skeleton
unearthed in Indonesia was a new species closely related to Homo
sapiens.
Some scientists had theorized
that the skeletal remains found on the Indonesian island of Flores
in 2003 belonged to a pygmy or a microcephalic—a human with an
abnormally small skull.
But researchers from Florida
State University 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 paleoneurologist Dean Falk, who is also chairwoman
of Florida State’s anthropology department, which conducted the
research with Indonesia’s Center for Archaeology along with other
international partners.
Her team’s study of both normal
and microcephalic human brains is published in Monday’s issue of
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 diminutive characters in JRR Tolkien’s
classic Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The brain of the Hobbit—more
accurately identified as “Homo Floresiensis”—was compared to
those of 10 normal humans and nine people suffering microcephaly, a
virus that stunts the development of the brain.
The complete skeleton and skull
unearthed in a cave on Flores measures 1.06 meters, igniting a
raging controversy among anthropologists, who until then had
believed the extinction of the Neanderthal 30,000 years ago left
Homo sapiens as the only surviving human species.
“It’s the $64 thousand
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?” said Falk.
--AFP
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