The tiny woman dubbed the Hobbit who lived 18,000 years ago on a remote Indonesian island deserves to be deemed a new human species and not a deformed modern human as skeptics assert, researchers said on Monday.In the latest salvo in a heated scientific shootout, an international team led by Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk compared the Hobbit’s skull to those of nine people with microcephaly, a rare condition in which the head is abnormally small due to improper brain development.They concluded the 3-foot-tall adult woman had a highly evolved brain, unlike that of a microcephalic person, confirming that she belongs to the proposed extinct species Homo floresiensis, closely related to Homo sapiens.“Lo and behold, it doesn’t look anything like a microcephalic. In fact, it’s antithetical,” Falk said, rebutting scientists like primatologist Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago who suggest the skull came from a person with microcephaly.Martin remained unconvinced. “My gut feeling is what they (Falk’s team) did is just played around with the measurements until they got something that suited them,” Martin said.Martin said the new study was flawed, questioned whether Falk’s team knew enough about microcephaly and insisted the question of a separate species is unresolved.In 2003, scientists had found the bones in a cave on the island of Flores east of Bali, contending they were a previously unknown species living at a time Homo sapiens were thought to be the world’s only human inhabitants.
