Scientists working with powerful imaging computers say the spectacular “Hobbit” fossil recently discovered in Indonesia had distinctive brain features that could justify its classification as a separate — and tiny — human ancestor.

The new report, published Thursday in the online journal Science Express, seems to support the idea of a sophisticated human dwarf species marooned for eons while modern man proliferated.

The new research produced a computer-generated model that compared surface impressions on the inside of the fossil skull with brain casts of modern and ancient humans, as well as chimps and other primates.

The scientists said the model showed the 3-foot specimen, nicknamed Hobbit, had a brain unlike anything they had seen before in the human lineage. The brain is chimplike in size, about 417 cubic centimeters.

Yet the Hobbit’s brain shared wrinkled surface features with the much larger brains of both modern humans and Homo erectus, a tool-making ancestor that lived in southeast Asia more than 1 million years ago. Some of those brain features are consistent with higher cognitive traits.

These brain features coincide with physical evidence of advanced behaviors, such as hunting, firemaking and using stone tools, which were found alongside the bones in a cave on the remote equatorial island of Flores. To some, this suggests an organized society of tiny hunters flourished on the island for millennia at a time when modern humans dominated the planet.

“This is a unique creature,” said Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk, who led the study. “We found amazing, specialized features across the surface from front to back.”

Thomas Sutikna of the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta, Indonesia, holds a skull that he and fellow scientists believe represents a new human species, Homo floresiensis. The 18,000-year-old skull was found in October in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores.

“These findings are consistent with the kinds of sophisticated behaviors that are hypothesized” for the Hobbit, Falk said, but she stopped short of saying the Hobbit was a tool-maker.

In October, scientists from Indonesia and Australia caused an international sensation with their report of a trove of tiny fossils. As many as eight individuals were represented in layers that were dated from 95,000 to 12,000 years ago. The Hobbit skeleton was the most complete specimen and contained the only skull.

In a project funded by the National Geographic Society, Falk and researchers from Washington University in St. Louis created a three-dimensional computer model of the brain using CT scans of the interior of the Hobbit’s skull.