The skull of a small extinct human was discovered last year in Indonesia and studies show that its small brain may have been capable of advanced thinking.
The creature is being called a Hobbit and lived on an Indonesian island until approximately 12,000 years ago.
According to a Reuters article,
“CAT scans of the inside of a skull — among the bones of eight individuals found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores — suggest brains that would have allowed advanced behavior such as toolmaking, the international team of researchers said.
They said further study of the skull of the creature, nicknamed “the Hobbit” after a literary character, showed it clearly was a normal adult of its species, not a mutant or diseased specimen, as some critics have alleged.”
“I am bowled over,” said Florida State University’s Dean Falk. “I thought we were going to see a little chimpanzee-like brain and I was wrong. Nothing like this has been seen before.”
A Voice of America article says:
“The researchers could not study the brain directly, since only the hard skull remained, not the soft tissue. But they were able to analyze a cast of the skull’s inner surface, which preserves the surface features of the brain, such as its folds and blood vessels.
The mold was not made from the actual, delicate skull itself, but was a virtual, computer image cast based on computerized scans of the skull interior, made at an Indonesian hospital by its discoverers”.
Murdok | Breaking eBusiness News
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