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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Extinct and With Tiny Brain, but a Clever Little Relative? One of the extinct little people of the Indonesian island of Flores, who were accorded a separate status in the early human family after their discovery was announced last October, has undergone its first intelligence test. In a study of the shape and contours of its tiny braincase, the 18,000-year-old adult female, who was barely three feet tall, was found to have anatomical attributes suggesting a capacity for higher thinking processes, a significant memory bank and ability to plan. Not bad for a species with a brain one-third the size of a contemporary human's. A research team, led by Dr. Dean Falk of Florida State University, reported yesterday that casts made of the interior cranium walls revealed that the brain had enlarged lobes and prominent ridges associated with higher cognitive processing. The results, described in a teleconference and interviews, are being published in today's issue of the journal Science. Other scientists said they were impressed by the research but cautiously withheld judgment on the interpretations. A few disputed the conclusions, contending that the diminutive individual was more likely a genetically maldeveloped modern human, possibly a kind of small-brained midget. The findings, said Dr. Falk and Dr. Michael J. Morwood of the University of New England in Australia, appeared to be consistent with the stone tools and other traces of advanced technology and behavior left by the little people of Flores, all of which had seemed inconceivable with such tiny brains. If this is supported by further investigations, scientists say, it could overturn conventional evolutionary thinking on the relationship of brain size to intelligence. In an article accompanying the report, Dr. Fred Spoor, an evolutionary anatomist at University College London, was quoted as saying the new study "upsets one of our main concepts of human evolution, that brain size has to increase for humans to become clever." A large modern humanlike brain is not necessarily required for some advanced behavior and skills, Dr. Spoor noted. "It can be done by reorganizing a small brain, with convolutions and rewiring, and this goes to the heart of our understanding of human evolution," he added. The brain study further seemed to confirm earlier conclusions that these people belonged to a separate human species, designated Homo floresiensis, that may be closely related to Homo erectus, the predecessor species of modern Homo sapiens. Another possibility raised by Dr. Falk's group is that Homo erectus and the little people may have shared an ancestor who lived two million or possibly three million years ago. "I started out skeptical," Dr. Falk said in the teleconference, arranged by the National Geographic Society. "I thought we would see something like a chimpanzee's brain, but nothing like this has been seen before." Speaking from Jakarta, Dr. Morwood, an archaeologist and a leader of the original discovery team with Dr. Peter Brown, also of Australia, said the brain findings "fit very well with other findings," namely the people's apparent ability to hunt pygmy elephants, use controlled fire and make advanced stone tools. Dr. Morwood said that fragments of eight specimens had been collected in the cave on Flores. There is no single complete skeleton, and only one skull. The fossils and artifacts are kept in Jakarta, where CT scans of the skull interior were taken for creating latex casts showing the brain's configuration. The casts were produced and analyzed at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Falk, an anthropologist who specializes in studies of archaic brains, compared the Homo floresiensis cast with those of an adult female chimpanzee, an adult female Homo erectus, a contemporary woman and a microcephalic human, one born with an abnormally small skull. She also broadened the study to include the skulls of gorillas and other chimpanzees in addition to hominid skulls even earlier than Homo erectus. Of particular interest in the braincase model were the enlarged temporal lobes, regions associated in living people with understanding speech and hearing. The Flores individual also had frontal lobes, under the forehead, that were unusually convoluted and distinct from anything in other early hominids. An area involved in decision making and planning actions, Dr. Falk said, is one part of this peculiar swelling. A source of the most persistent skepticism is speculation that the individual could be a modern human who happened to be afflicted with a brain-shrinking deformity called microcephaly. Dr. Teuku Jacob, one of Indonesia's senior paleontologists, who has been working directly with the skull and bones, has been quoted several times arguing such a view. Dr. Robert Martin, a primatologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, said that he and colleagues in Britain were preparing a paper contending that the examined braincase was too small to be explained easily by ordinary dwarfism or the tendency of isolated people on islands to become smaller over generations. In such cases, Dr. Martin said, brain size would usually not diminish by the same amount as body size. Dr. Martin said that he was not ready to rule out microcephaly on the basis of a test of a single microcephalic braincase. But Dr. Falk pointed out that of all the specimens compared with the Flores braincase, the microcephalic's was the least similar. "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," Dr. Falk said.
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#1. To: 2Trievers (#0)
If this is a true report, all the short people would have to do today is use what they have, and they would be superior thinkers.
There are a lot of big tall idiots (like Bill O'Reilly). The size of the cranium can be very misleading. Maybe short people have better circulation in their brains, no long appendages to send blood back and forth to.
and particularly short females since females have one less appendage which requires blood to be sent back and forth to.
#4. To: christine (#3)
LOL!!! VERY true!
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