‘Hobbit’ skull called that of a new species
From Times Wire Reports
The tiny woman dubbed the Hobbit, who lived 18,000 years ago on an Indonesian island, should be deemed a new human species and not a deformed modern human as skeptics assert, researchers reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A team led by Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk compared the Hobbit’s skull with those of nine people with microcephaly, a condition in which the head is abnormally small. They concluded the 3-foot-tall adult woman had a highly evolved brain, confirming she belonged to the proposed extinct species Homo floresiensis.
