As many of you probably already know from the media coverage, a new study led by anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University has given us the first glimpse into the brain of Homo floresiensis, aka the Hobbit. As published online today in Science Express, Falk and her colleagues—including Charles Hildebolt in St. Louis and members of the original Australian-Indonesian discovery team—show that the tiny hominid may have had advanced cognitive abilities, which could explain the sophisticated stone tools found with the creature in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. The paper is accompanied by a news story written by yours truly in the print edition of Science.

Falk, an expert on hominid brain evolution, took CT scans of the hominid’s skull that the original team had made in Jakarta and, with the help of Hildebolt and his technicians in St. Louis, created a “virtual endocast” of the hominid’s brain. The brain had a startling degree of expansions and convolutions, especially in such cognitively important areas as the temporal and frontal lobes. For example, an area in the frontal lobes known as Brodmann’s Area 10, implicated in taking initiative and planning ahead, was extremely ruffled and folded, as if to pack in as much brain power as possible in as small as possible a space.

Moreover, when this virtual endocast was compared to virtual and latex endocasts of a large number of living primates as well as extinct hominids, including a modern human microcephalic, in overall shape it most resembled the larger-brained Homo erectus--although this extinct hominid does not show the same degree of brain convolution. The Hobbit least resembled the microcephalic modern human. As mentioned in earlier posts, some researchers—most notably Alan Thorne and Maciej Henneberg in Australia and Teuku Jacob in Indonesia—have argued strenuously that the Hobbit is not a new species at all, but a deformed, microcephalic modern human. I quote Thorne in my story saying that he is still not convinced, on the grounds that microcephaly can take a wide variety of forms and sizes, especially so-called “secondary microcephaly.” This possibility cannot yet be entirely disproven. But Falk and a number of other researchers argue that the burden of proof is now on the doubters to show that secondary microcephaly can result in a brain that looks like Homo erectus.

The findings raise new questions about where the hominid came from. Was it the descendant of a population of Homo erectus that got small in brain and body, a case of the well-known phenomenon of island dwarfism? Or did a small-brained, small-bodied hominid somehow get to East Asia from Africa, evolve higher cognition without expanding its brain size, and survive on Flores until 18,000 years ago? These are some of the big questions that researchers will now have to ponder.

Finally, an update on the wandering bones: Except for a tibia and femur of the hominid’s right leg, Jacob has returned all the rest of the bones to their official repository in Jakarta.