Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
of these Floresians' spiritual life.” Assuming that hobbits were as intel-
ligent and rational as suggested in the
Nature
announcement, Howse
wondered if they had immortal souls, because “the assumption is that
raised the specter of the so-called mind-body problem that was articu-
lated over three and a half centuries ago by René Descartes when he
identified consciousness and self-awareness as separate from the physi-
cal brain. Even today, many people “naturally believe in the Ghost in
the Machine: that we have bodies made of matter and spirits made of an
was not a new species, the problem was not her soul, however. It was
her tiny brain. How could a hominin with a tiny ape-sized brain be so
intelligent? This is where my team's research would come in.
the magic of mallinckrodt
When David Hamlin told me he wanted me to make a latex endocast
from a model of LB1's skull for his National Geographic film, I had
reservations about this being our sole source of information about her
brain. As described in chapter 2, an endocast reproduces whatever im-
pressions the brain happened to imprint on the inner walls of the brain-
case during an individual's lifetime. With good luck, it may show cere-
bral convolutions, blood vessels, and even sutures of the skull, as was
the case for Taung (figure 7). With bad luck (or a skull from a very
young or very old individual), an endocast reveals little more than the
general shape of the brain and some superficial blood vessels.
Everything would depend on the clarity of the impressions the brain
had left stamped within LB1's skull. The model that David intended to
send was a transparent resin replica of the skull that revealed not only
Although such a replica would provide valuable information, I worried
that a latex endocast made from its interior would be blurrier than an
endocast from LB1's actual braincase, because some anatomical detail is
