Smart hobbits

Scientists are calling the little people whose remains were found on Flores Island in Indonesia recently “hobbits” on accout of their diminutive stature. They appear to have mastered skills previously thought impossible for critters of such teensy brain: Despite having very small brains — roughly the size of a chimpanzee’s — they appear to have … Continue reading “Smart hobbits”

Scientists are calling the little people whose remains were found on Flores Island in Indonesia recently “hobbits” on accout of their diminutive stature. They appear to have mastered skills previously thought impossible for critters of such teensy brain:

Despite having very small brains — roughly the size of a chimpanzee’s — they appear to have hunted animals twice their size, made stone tools for hunting and butchering, and used fire for cooking.

“It’s remarkable. We’ve always been taught and thought that as humans evolved, the bigger the brain, the better they are,” said Charles Hildebolt, a physical anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

“If this little creature actually made the tools and was using the tools, built the fire and was using the fire, then that really tips human evolution upside down and changes the way we have to think about brain evolution. It may indicate that the reorganization of the brain was just as important and may be even more important than size.”

Management dudes will be happy to know that reorganization sometimes works, and others to know that size doesn’t always matter.

See also BBC.

4 thoughts on “Smart hobbits”

  1. That guy Hildebolt is some kind of numbnut; that is, if he was actually taught that ‘the bigger the brain, the better’. It has been proven time and again; though most notably by Stephen Jay Gould in his book ‘The Mismeasure of Man’, that there is no genetic predisposition based on physical characteristics that limits the potential for intelligence.

  2. Shank, I certainly agree. I was also struck by the fixation on “microcephally” if only because true microcephalics would have a nearly zero chance of survival to “adulthood” in more remote prehistoric times.

  4. The correlation between brain size and intelligence may have been greatly overstated in the past, but that doesn’t mean there is no correlation at all. See, e.g., http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vwsu/gened/learn-modules/top_longfor/phychar/culture-humans-2two.html (referring to the “rough” correlation between brain size and intelligence).

    See also http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/DASL/Stories/BrainSizeandIntelligence.html.

    I haven’t studied this area much, just some food for thought…

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