Boskop Man

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Boskop Man was an alleged group of hominids from 10,000 years ago. They had remarkably large brains (1,800-2,000cc typical) and childlike facial features, and were all super-evolved geniuses, with an IQ of 150, compared to us mere Cro-Magnons.

Unfortunately, they were a figment of anthropologists' imaginations, based on completely spurious data and severely biased samples.

Contents

[edit] The claim

In autumn 1913, two farmers in Boskop, South Africa found hominid skull fragments while digging a drainage ditch. They brought the find to Frederick W. Fitz­Simons of the Port Elizabeth Museum. The skull came to the attention of paleontologist S. H. Haughton, who reported the skull was at least 1,832cc — 25% larger than that typical of normal modern-day humans. Scottish scientist Robert Broom got "the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc."

It was suggested that the very large Boskop skull was an aberration, caused by hydrocephalus or some other disease. However, the skull had a face taking up one fifth of the cranium size — comparable to a Cro-Magnon child, not the one third of the cranium taken by an adult Cro-Magnon face. The nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.

After nearly a century in obscurity, the claimed Boskop race was brought back to public attention in neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger's 2008 book Big Brain, and in a 2009 Discover article reprinting an excerpt from the book.[1] Lynch and Granger start from "25% bigger brain", extrapolate from there with their neuroscience knowledge and spend two-thirds of the excerpt on fanciful extrapolation concerning the life of the Boskop.

[edit] The sad truth

The Discover excerpt presents 1920s-era anthropology as if it were the state of science today. Lynch and Granger are experts in neuroscience, with a long list of publications on memory, cortical organization, and chemical regulation of brain activity. However, neither is an anthropologist or archaeologist — they were speculating well outside their expertise. Paleoanthropologist John Hawks notably bludgeoned their foolishness into the ground.[2][3]

The "Boskopoid" race was a commonplace of anthropological thought concerning the people of the area from about 1915 to 1930. Anthropologists had tried to apply racial categories such as "Negroid," "Bushman," "Hottentot" and "Strandloper." But distinctions between these groups did not appear to extend far into the prehistoric past. So anthropologists constructed a "Boskopoid" type, for those with later "Bush" or "Strandloper" resemblances.

In fact, a small set of large skulls were taken from a much larger varied sample of skulls, and branded "Boskopoid." Any old, large skull was a "Boskop" - all between 1700cc and 2000cc, which is large but within the known range for adult homo sapiens sapiens males. Thus, the sample was hugely biased.

Ronald Singer reviewed[4] the evidence as of 1958 and concluded there was no reason to maintain that any such "big-headed, small-faced group" had existed.

[edit] The science fictional trope

So the Boskops had been consigned to the trash can of science. But as these things sometimes do, the idea was kept alive in popular culture. Loren Eiseley included an essay on Boskop Man in his 1958 collection The Immense Journey. Eiseley conjectured that the Boskops had large brains and small faces and were therefore, as evidenced by their pedomorphism, more highly evolved than Cro-Magnons. They were therefore the "Future Man."

You know what these people look like from sci-fi: they have the facial proportions of grey aliens.

Horrifyingly for their claim to be doing anything resembling science, Lynch and Granger actually referenced Eiseley's ridiculous teleological puffery in their own work.

[edit] Footnotes

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