If you’ve ever suffered from a sore jaw that popped or clicked when you chewed gum or crunched hard foods, you may be able to blame it on your extinct ancestors. That’s according to a recent study of the chewing mechanics of an ancient human relative called Homo floresiensis, which inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores before our species arrived there some 50,000 years ago.

That’s according to a Duke University-led study of the chewing mechanics of an ancient human relative called Homo floresiensis, which inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores before our species arrived there some 50,000 years ago.

Not much more than three feet tall, the hominin’s diminutive size earned it the nickname «the Hobbit,» after the characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s «The Lord of the Rings.» For the new study, which was published Aug. 13 in the journal Interface Focus, the researchers 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 the 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, such as the stiffness of the bones and the pulling action of the muscles. Then they had the virtual skull chomp down with its back teeth — premolars and molars — and analyzed the forces at work with each bite, essentially subjecting it to a digital crash test.

The researchers mapped the strains within their digital model of the Hobbit’s facial bones during biting, comparing the results to similar simulations for earlier human relatives called australopiths that lived some two to three million years ago in Africa, along with chimpanzees and humans living today.

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Materials provided by Duke University. Original written by Veronique Koch. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.