Falk and researchers from Washington University in St. Louis took three-dimensional CT scans of the interior of the Hobbit's skull. Known as virtual endocasts, these computer-manipulated images show the wrinkles, vessels and other surface features that made faint impressions on the skull's lining.
They compared that model with latex casts of the brains of chimps, a female Homo erectus, a contemporary woman, a pygmy and a European specimen of a person with a small-brain syndrome known as microcephaly.