‘Hobbit creatures had advanced brains’

But in the first independent tests conducted since the discovery was announced, researchers say that the brain of H. floresiensis was not only advanced enough to use fire and tools, but also unique in its design.

‘‘I’ve never seen anything like this brain. I was bowled over,’’ said Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University and lead author of a study that appeared on Thursday in Science Express. The analysis shows the brains were similar in shape and size to our more primitive ancestors, but had frontal and temporal lobes —— where reasoning and higher thoughts originate —— a little more like ours.

Researchers in Australia and Indonesia announced in October that remains on the island of Flores belonged to a hominid that grew to be only 3 feet tall and evolved from Homo erectus, one of our primitive ancestors. They found the bones of eight individuals near a village called Liang Bua, including one intact skull believed to belong to a woman about 30 years old.

The researchers labeled the skull LB1 and nicknamed the creatures ‘‘hobbits’’ after the dwarflike characters in J.R.R Tolkien’s novels. The remains are being kept at the Indonesian Center for Archaeology in Jakarta.

At a news conference to discuss the paper Thursday, researchers said some of the remains were damaged while in temporary storage at Gajah Mada University in Jakarta. A pelvis was ‘‘almost totally destroyed’’’ while being transported to the university, and Teuku Jacob, an anthropologist at the university, allowed bone fragments to be taken without permission to a lab in Germany for DNA analysis, said Michael Morwood, a researcher at the University of New England in Australia who leads the team that discovered H. floresiensis. Jacob has written at least two articles saying that he thinks the hobbits were just small humans. —Lat-WP