Brain scan shows Hobbit apeman was intelligent

A brain scan of the "Hobbit" apeman has revealed that the recently discovered species of dwarf human was almost certainly intelligent, despite having a skull no bigger than a grapefruit.

A fossilised skeleton of the human-like creature was announced last year to the astonishment of palaeontologists who were amazed that another member of the human family could still have been living as recently as 13,000 years ago.

Just as unusual was the small size of Homo floresiensis who was only about three feet tall, even when fully mature. It also had a head that was perfectly in proportion to the rest of its body - unlike modern-day pygmies whose bodies are dwarfed but whose heads are normal size.

This raised the possibility that, with a brain a third of the size of human brains today, the hobbit was not much more intelligent than a chimpanzee. But a medical scan has now revealed its brain structure was far more organised than that of any ape's.

Professor Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee, who led the research team, said that the inside lining of the fossilised skull clearly suggests that the brain of H. floresiensis was capable of the higher thought patterns characteristic of humans.

"I thought the Homo floresiensis brain would look like a chimp's. I was wrong. There were fancier things on [its] brain," Professor Falk said.

The study, published in the online version of the journal Science, also discredits the idea of some scientists that the Hobbit was simply an unfortunate person suffering from a congenital disorder called microcephaly, where the brain does not grow to its full size.

The diminutive human was discovered in 2003 by a team of Indonesian and Australian scientists who had excavated a large cave site on the remote Indonesian island of Flores.

The scientists dated the bones and skull to about 18,000 years ago but subsequently found the remains of about six or seven other dwarf individuals who could still have been living 13,000 years ago.

Excavations also found remnants of miniature stone tools, burnt material suggesting controlled fire and the bones of pygmy elephants which could have been hunted and butchered by members of the dwarf species.

But a few weeks after the announcement last October, an Indonesian anthropologist called Professor Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University, who was not part of the original research team, said that H. floresiensis was not a new species but just a person suffering from microcephaly, which explained the small braincase.

To make matters worse, Professor Jacob took the matter into his own hands by taking the fossilised bones into his personal possession and locking them away in his own university vaults. He has subsequently returned all but two of the bones to Indonesia's Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta.

However, Professor Richard Roberts of Wollongong University in Australia, a member of the original discovery team, said that the brain scan of the skull now settles the matter.

"In a nutshell, I think it shows that the hobbit was certainly not a microcephalic. In fact, of all the brains they compared it against, the hobbit's brain was least like that of a microcephalic and not at all similar to a modern human pygmy," Professor Roberts said.

The hobbit's frontal lobe - the area of the brain responsible for intelligent behaviour - is extremely well developed. "This explains how the one-metre tall hobbit could have made such sophisticated stone tools, made ocean crossings, hunted [pygmy] elephants and other activities that require deep thought and social organisation," Professor Roberts said.

Normally a cast of the brain can be made by pouring rubber into the empty cranium, but the skull of the hobbit was so delicate that Professor Falk's team used computer-generated images from a medical scan of the skull carried out in a hospital in Jakarta.

The intricate images revealed structures of the brain such as the lunate sulcus which is normally a sign of advanced brain development. These virtual "endocasts" were compared with other modern humans - including a person with microcephaly - the brain of an extinct species called Homo erectus, and the skulls of a number of apes.

Professor Falk said the images revealed that the brain of H. floresiensis was quite different from that of apes and other humans.

"The scaling of brain to body isn't at all what we'd expect to find in pygmies, and the shape is all wrong to be a microcephalic. This is something new," he said.

"The discovery of this species has flummoxed the field of anthropology. I believe it equals or surpasses the identification of other ancestors such a the Taung hominin in 1925, which marked the birth of modern palaeoanthropology and sparked an ongoing debate on human evolution," he said.

- INDEPENDENT