Is the Hobbit's Brain Unfeasibly Small?
Homo floresiensis, a pygmy-sized small-brained hominin popularly known as 'the Hobbit' was discovered five years ago, but controversy continues over whether the small brain is actually due to a pathological condition. How can its tiny brain size be explained?
The commonly held assumption that as primates evolved, their brains always tended to get bigger has been challenged by a team of scientists at Cambridge and Durham. Their work helps solve the mystery of whether Homo floresiensis -- dubbed the Hobbit due to its diminutive stature -- was a separate human species or a diseased individual.
The team combined previously published datasets of brain and body mass with measurements from fossil remains. They then used three different mathematical methods to reconstruct patterns of brain evolution across the primate family tree from these 37 existing and 23 extinct primate species.
The results show that while brains evolved to be larger in both relative and absolute terms along most branches of the primate family tree, the opposite happened along several lineages. For example brain size shrank during the evolution of Mouse Lemurs, Marmosets and Mangabeys.
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The commonly held assumption that as primates evolved, their brains always tended to get bigger has been challenged by a team of scientists at Cambridge and Durham. Their work helps solve the mystery of whether Homo floresiensis -- dubbed the Hobbit due to its diminutive stature -- was a separate human species or a diseased individual.
The team combined previously published datasets of brain and body mass with measurements from fossil remains. They then used three different mathematical methods to reconstruct patterns of brain evolution across the primate family tree from these 37 existing and 23 extinct primate species.
The results show that while brains evolved to be larger in both relative and absolute terms along most branches of the primate family tree, the opposite happened along several lineages. For example brain size shrank during the evolution of Mouse Lemurs, Marmosets and Mangabeys.