How did Hobbits chew?

Not much more than three feet tall, Homo floresiensis’ diminutive size earned it the nickname “the Hobbit,” after the characters in . Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Rebecca Cook, a doctoral student in evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, wanted to understand how the Hobbit’s skull behaved while it ate its food. However, thousands of years of fossilization had left its skull -- the only one that has been found so far -- damaged and misshapen. Before Cook and the team of researchers could test it out, they had to restore it as close to its original shape as possible. Collaborators at Italy’s University of Bologna created a 3D virtual model, built from X-ray CT scans, digitally filling in the missing pieces to reconstruct what the skull of Homo floresiensis might have looked like when it roamed the island some 100,000 to 60,000 years ago. From that, they used computer simulations and a technique called finite element analysis to give the virtual skull characteristics that mimic the real thing