Died aged 30 on the Indonesian island of Flores. Last year, 18 thousand years later, her bones were discovered and caused great excitement - a new species of human was discovered! Scientists claimed that she and her relatives lived until about 10,000 years ago, at the same time as humans, the Homo sapiens. They were just smaller: they were about a meter tall, and their heads were about the size of a grapefruit. The bone diggers called them "Hobbits", after the heroes of JR Tolkien's books. However, a few skeptical cheerleaders immediately jumped. They warned that these might be the remains of a sick dwarf with a distorted skull.
But now it turns out that the Hobbits, or in their scientific name Homo-Fluorescence, are indeed a new species of humans. They were small people, but smart. A team of scientists led by Prof. Dean Falk from the University of Florida in the USA, recreated the shape of the hobbits' brains with the help of computer scans. A report on his research was published this weekend in the scientific journal "Science", published in the USA.
Fred Spoor, professor of anatomy and evolution from "University College" London, claims in an article in the journal that the new study "challenges one of our central concepts about human evolution, according to which the size of the brain must increase in order for humans to become smarter." According to him, some of the advanced human behaviors and skills do not necessarily require a larger brain, like the brains of humans: "This can be done through the reorganization of a small brain.
According to Prof. Falk, "This goes to the heart of our understanding of human evolution."
Last year, eight specimens of the new species, but only one skull, of a woman, were discovered in a cave on the island of Insunzi. The tools left behind by the little people testified to behavior and a level of sophistication that some researchers found unlikely, given their small minds. Falk created a computer model based on the shape of the inside of the hobbit's skull, which preserves surface features of the brain. She compared the resulting brain pattern to the brain of chimpanzees, early human species, dwarves, and the brain of a human suffering from microcephaly, a degenerative disease that may have caused the hobbit's skull to shrink.
Falk discovered that relative to its size, the hobbit's brain had large temporal lobes - areas of the brain that are related to understanding speech and processing auditory information. "Furthermore," Falk says, "the hobbit's developed frontal lobes hint at advanced cognition. They were capable of high thought processing, planning ability and a significant memory."
But a handful of scientists still dispute the conclusions. According to them, it is more likely that their scientific name homo-fluoresciensis was modern humans with genetic defects in their development, perhaps "dwarves with a small brain".
The hobbit may be a descendant of homo-erectus. If so, they can be considered "distant brothers" of humans, because Homo-erectus is the ancestor of Homo-sapiens. Prof. Falk raises another possibility, according to which Homo-erectus and the Hobbit have a common ancestor who lived 2-3 million years ago.
The youngest individual discovered in the cave lived 13 thousand years ago. However, the team members did not rule out the possibility that they lived until relatively recently. According to Dr. Richard Roberts, one of the team of researchers who discovered the hobbits in Indonesia, "There are many folktales in Flores about these people, consistent and incredibly detailed stories. The stories hint that there may be more than a grain of truth in the idea that they were still living in Flores when the Dutch arrived there, in the 16th century."
