Brain scan suggests 'Hobbit' capable of complex reasoning

A brain scan of the "Hobbit" apeman found in Indonesia last year appears to have settled a scientific dispute as to whether the creature was indeed a new member of the human family or just an unfortunate suffering a congenital brain disease.

The Hobbit's remains, which were found last year on the Indonesian island of Flores, were thought to herald a discovery that could, if proved, force a rethink of human evolution.

Homo floresiensis was about three feet tall when fully mature, with a head perfectly in proportion to the rest of its body. Its remains, when tested, were shown to be about 18,000 years old.

However, an Indonesian anthropologist, Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University, claimed that, far from being a new species, H. floresiensis was a person suffering from the congenital brain disease microcephaly. Professor Jacob then locked away the remains and refused access to other scientists.

But he subsequently returned the fossils to Indonesia's Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta. A team led by Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee performed the scan of the creature's skull.

Writing yesterday in the online version of the journal, Science, Professor Falk said the lining of the skull suggested the brain of H. floresiensis was capable of the higher thought patterns characteristic of humans. "I thought the H. floresiensis brain would look like a chimp's. I was wrong," he wrote.

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," 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.

Professor Falk said the images revealed that the brain of H. floresiensis was quite different from 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."