Copyright 2005 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
Copyright 2005 The Dallas Morning News
The Dallas Morning News
March 4, 2005, Friday
SECTION: DOMESTIC NEWS
KR-ACC-NO: K5644
LENGTH: 552 words
HEADLINE: Island's tiny humans had advanced brains, researchers find
BYLINE: By Alexandra Witze
BODY:
DALLAS _ Frodo and Bilbo might have met their intellectual match in
the prehistoric hobbits from Indonesia.
New research shows that the tiny humans, nicknamed "hobbits," who
once inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores had relatively
advanced brains capable of higher levels of thinking and cognition.
The finding meshes with archaeological studies of these long-vanished
people, who apparently had mastered tool-making and hunting tens of
thousands of years ago.
Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University, led an
international team of researchers that described a hobbit's unique
braincase in Friday's online edition of the journal Science.
"I thought we were going to see a little chimpanzeelike brain, and I
was wrong," she said. "I'm bowled over."
Archaeologists have unearthed the bones of eight hobbits, formally
known as Homo floresiensis, but only one skull. Falk CAT-scanned that
fragile, 18,000-year-old skull, then created a clear resin copy that
she could study.
"In life, pulsating brains leave impressions within the braincase,"
Falk said during a news conference sponsored by the National
Geographic Society.
Although just one-third the size of the average modern human brain,
the hobbit brain turned out to have several features that could
indicate higher thinking skills, she said.
For instance, the brain had enlarged temporal lobes, an area that is
bigger in humans and helps with functions such as memory and emotion.
Another area, called Brodmann's area 10, was also bigger than
expected; in humans, this region is involved in undertaking
initiatives and planning future actions.
The hobbit skull didn't resemble similar casts taken from skulls of
modern humans, pygmies, gorillas, chimpanzees, or other ancient human
species, Falk said. Together, the brain features strengthen the case
that Homo floresiensis is its own unique species _ not simply an
undersized version of Homo sapiens.
That challenge, along with other controversies, has swirled around
the hobbit fossils ever since they were publicly revealed last fall.
In the latest twist, the researchers who excavated the bones have
finally gotten them back from another scientist who "borrowed" them
without a clearly understood agreement.
After being dug up, the bones had stayed in Jakarta under the care of
Tony Djubiantono, director of the Center for Archaeology there. But
another scientist at the center loaned the bones to Teuku Jacob, a
paleoanthropologist in the city of Yogyakarta. Other members of the
original research team complained.
Last week, Jacob returned all but three leg bones, said Michael
Morwood of the University of New England in Australia, one of the
original researchers. On Thursday, Morwood called the condition of
the returned bones "appalling," saying that many critical details had
been destroyed during transport.
"Some enormously important material has been damaged," he said.
In brighter news, some researchers are optimistic that they can
retrieve ancient DNA from some of the hair and bones, which could
better illuminate the hobbits' relationship to modern humans. And
this summer, the original team plans to return to the excavation site
to hunt for more fossils.
___
Visit The Dallas Morning News on the World Wide Web at
http://www.dallasnews.com/
JOURNAL-CODE: DA
LOAD-DATE: March 4, 2005
|
top