Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
nothing in Hobbit's little endocast that suggests she
would have been
incapable of the activities and cognitive skills that were attributed to
her by Peter Brown, Mike Morwood, and their collaborators. Contrary
to the trend for other hominins, brain size is unlikely to have increased
during the evolution of
Homo floresiensis.
Instead, only parts of the brain
entailing the posterior association cortex, the prefrontal cortex, and the
back part of the temporal lobes seem to have enlarged much. As we
have seen, these regions are especially important for higher cognition
in modern humans, and it's a good guess that they were for hobbits too.
Recall from chapter 4 that, in 2008, I learned from unpublished mate-
rials at the University of the Witwatersrand Archives that Raymond
Dart had thoroughly described expansions on the Taung endocast in
exactly
these same three cortical regions. Furthermore, Dart observed
that these areas were widely distributed across the endocast, and he
expressed the opinion that expansion in them was the only type of evi-
dence that could indicate the evolutionary relationship between
Australo-
pithecus
and humans. You can imagine my amazement, then, at discover-
ing Dart's observations three years after my colleagues at Mallinckrodt
and I had discovered expansions in the same association areas on LB1's
endocast (along with noting the importance of their being widely dis-
tributed or globally arranged). I had gone to Wits to learn about Dart's
reaction to the controversy that surrounded Taung and how it affected
his research, in order to compare the discoveries of
Australopithecus afri-
canus
and
Homo floresiensis
from historical and philosophical points of
view. This neurological coincidence left me wondering if there might
not be some sort of evolutionary connection between the two.
Meanwhile, Hobbit's little endocast was about to deliver a big evo-
lutionary message—brains don't necessarily have to grow bigger to
become better. The addition of LB1 to the hominin record opened a
broader range of possibilities regarding the relative importance of brain
size and neurological reorganization in hominins, and one couldn't help
but wonder what other surprising species of hominin were out there just
