Sick Hobbits, Quarrelsome Scientists - The Fossil Chronicles - page 139

Figure 21. The right side of the virtual endocast of LB1 compared with that
of the microcephalic Basuto woman. The two have completely different
shapes. Courtesy of Kirk Smith, Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology.
to have a volume of 276 cm 3 , which differed only slightly from the 272
cm 3 volume that was originally reported. 27
Nor did we share a concern expressed about the microcephalic's
death at only 10 years of age in comparison with LB1's in adulthood.
A landmark study by Michel Hofman of the Netherlands Institute for
Brain Research, in Amsterdam, showed that brain size stops increasing
in microcephalics after they reach an age of around four years. 28 The
brain of the little microcephalic we included in our first study had been
well past this stage of development. Furthermore, we later showed that
the results of quantitative studies on microcephalic endocasts are not
skewed by including less-than-fully-adult individuals in samples. 29
Clearly, Martin and his colleagues had gone to great lengths to argue
that LB1 had a pathology that entailed growth retardation of the body
combined with microcephaly. As an example, they mentioned microce-
phalic osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II (MOPD II), which
has been attributed to LB1 more recently by a German team led by
Anita Rauch . 30 Although MOPD II patients share short stature with
LB1, the resemblance stops there, as can be seen by comparing images
of both . 31 For starters, relative head size is markedly larger in MOPD