The Extinct Boskops Humanoids: Brains 30% larger than humans.

[Ichingcarpenter]

Two esteemed brain scientists, Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, in their new book, "Big Brain," call the top-of-the-tree paradigm "species chauvinism." "We often," they write, "fall into a fallacy of thinking - an almost irresistible fallacy - imagining that a feature or characteristic that we possess must have been carefully built that way, just for us."

In "Big Brain," the authors reintroduce the Boskops: an extinct, controversial, 10,000-year-old African hominid that possessed a brain about 30 percent larger than ours is now. The Boskops had little frames and massive heads, and their mere presence in the fossil record throws the idea of unidirectional evolutionary progress into question.

Were the Boskops more intelligent than we are now? More capable? If they were, why did they die out? Lynch and Granger offer up several theories. Ultimately they conclude that the Boksops "would far exceed contemporary people in at least some mental capacities."

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2008/03/16/all_creatures_great_and_overrated/


The Extinct Human Species That Was Smarter Than Us
The superintelligent Boskops had small, childlike faces and huge melon heads.
by Jane Bosveld

Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger (Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95)

“Sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams,” says John Merrick in the play The Elephant Man. He might have been speaking for the Boskops, an almost forgotten group of early humans who lived in southern Africa between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago. Judging from fossil remains, scientists say the Boskops were similar to modern humans but had small, childlike faces and huge melon heads that held brains about 30 percent larger than our own.

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar/21-the-extinct-human-species-that-was-smarter-than-us

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I didn't know of this discover which I find interesting.


Actually, I think, they didn't die out, they are the grays, you know the ones doing the alien probes

[mainer]

1. Bigger brains, but how many convolutions?

Interesting stuff. But it's not just the overall size, it's the amount of gray matter, that determines intelligence. I wonder if they know the answer to that. Certainly the inside surface of the skulls might provide a clue as to convolutions. I may have to get this book!

[xchrom]

2. you raise an interesting question -- and they must

rest some of that on the notion of a bigger brain holding more of everything.

likewise -- we have difficulty measuring the intelligence of species with big brains -- like dolphins -- but who don't ''act'' like us.

one thing i wondered about was the larger head more difficult to give birth to? or was there other physical difficulties that went with it?

recommend

[Indenturedebtor]

5. And even more important to note than that I think

Is the fact that volume/surface area do not equall intelligence. A genius and a vegetable have more or less the same amount of grey matter. It's the number of connections, degree of myelination (coating on your neurons axons), etc that truly give rise to raw intellectual ability. Otherwise all women would be generally less intelligent than men and we know that is total and utter BS.

You can take every single computer on this planet and dump them all on top of each other in a landfill and you won't have a mighty super computer.

The brain is all about connections and organization. Cool stuff though :D

[OwnedByFerrets]

3. Just proof that the brutes....

with small brains will win out in the end.:think:

[LiberalEsto]

4. They probably died out because

Women and babies died during childbirth, due to the large heads of the infants.

[tinrobot]

6. Obviously, they couldn't find proper hats...

...and died of exposure.

[mainegreen]

7. If Boskops have been known about since 1913...

why the seemingly total lack of any information or reference to them?

I'm not saying it isn't true, but whenever I encounter seeming 'walled gardens' of information on the internet, I get suspicious.

[semillama]

8. exactly.

Even the wikipedia article only has references (apart from the recent book) up to 1925.

Intriguing. Doesn't seem like they were a particularly large or successful group - I don't think any further "boskops" remains have been found since the first set, and that doesn't bode well for assigning a different species.

There's some parallels between this and H. floresensis, but I think the Flores hominid has been more thoroughly examined than the boskops hominid. it's pretty weird. You'd think at least there'd be some sort of essay or something online purporting to debunk it, but nothing.