According to a recent article in Discover magazine, scientists have located ancient skulls that appear human, but not. Like Neanderthals or Homo Erectus, these skulls appear to belong to a branch of the human family — except they are too big, and have child-like faces. The stunning conclusion? These ancient “Boskops” may have been up to 50% smarter than you and me today:
We have seen reports of Boskop brain size ranging from 1,650 to 1,900 cc. Let’s assume that an average Boskop brain was around 1,750 cc. What does this mean in terms of function? How would a person with such a brain differ from us? Our brains are roughly 25 percent larger than those of the late Homo erectus. We might say that the functional difference between us and them is about the same as between ourselves and Boskops.
The authors speculate that Boskops may have had better, more vibrant memories, the ability to “multi-task” inside their own heads, and a rich ability to plan out actions and consequences.
They also speculate that, in 10,000 B.C., such immense brain power just wasn’t all that useful in terms of everyday survival. Plus, huge heads and big brains come with big costs — childbirth is much more difficult, plus you need more food and energy to support the brain.
It’s wonderful to think about — humbling, even, since we modern humans think we’re the ne plus ultra of evolution. But not everyone agrees. Paleoanthropologist John Hawks says that the big skulls are actually within the realm of the possible, even for modern humans, and people just picked out the biggest ones, then called them a separate race:
If you do a simple Google Scholar search for “Boskop”, you will discover that this has not been a going topic in human evolution for nearly fifty years. Most intellectual effort on the topic of “Boskopoids” happened between 1915 and 1930. I want to emphasize how easy it is to discover these things by a simple Google search. This is obscure knowledge, but for a good reason — it’s obsolete and has been for fifty years!
Sadly, Hawks does a pretty convincing job of debunking the big-brained prehuman theory. But I’m not enough of an anthropologist to judge for sure.
Grant Hamilton
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