What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us?

[Ichingcarpenter]

The Boskops had big eyes, child-like faces, and an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens.

Even if brain size accounts for just 10 to 20 percent of an IQ test score, it is possible to conjecture what kind of average scores would be made by a group of people with 30 percent larger brains. We can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149.

This is a score that would be labeled at the genius level. And if there was normal variability among Boskops, as among the rest of us, then perhaps 15 to 20 percent of them would be expected to score over 180. In a classroom with 35 big-headed, baby-faced Boskop kids, you would likely encounter five or six with IQ scores at the upper range of what has ever been recorded in human history. The Boskops coexisted with our Homo sapiens forebears. Just as we see the ancient Homo erectus as a savage primitive, Boskop may have viewed us in somewhat the same way.

They died and we lived, and we can’t answer the question why. Why didn’t they outthink the smaller-brained hominids like ourselves and spread across the planet? Perhaps they didn’t want to.

Yet today, although Neanderthals and Homo erectus are widely known, Boskops are almost entirely forgotten. Some of our ancestors are clearly inferior to us, with smaller brains and apelike countenances. They’re easy to make fun of and easy to accept as our precursors. In contrast, the very fact of an ancient ancestor like Boskop, who appears un-apelike and in fact in most ways seems to have had characteristics superior to ours, was destined never to be popular.


http://discovermagazine.com/2009/the-brain-2/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us

Boskop Man
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskop_Man

[OldEurope]

1. The more intelligent...

...gave in. Now the idiots rule.

:evilgrin:

[Goldstein1984]

2. I'm going to venture a guess that if they were more intelligent,

then they were probably peaceful, maybe even proto-pacifist.

They stood no chance against our proto-imperialist ancestors.

They also may have threatened the proto-national interests of our proto-anti-intellectuals.

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. What would Mr. Osborne think about it?

Could the Boskops not find the proper hat size for africa?

[Tanuki]

4. Bigger heads would have made childbirth more difficult,

so maybe fewer of them survived (or their mothers died in childbirth). Moreover, the article says they had smaller jaws and teeth, so they may not have been as well adapted to the available food supply as their contemporaries, diminishing their chances of survival.

[Orrex]

5. I call BS on the post hoc assignment of IQ scores based on brain size

Even if that might work for modern humans, there's no basis for concluding that it works for non-modern non-humans. For that matter, IQ doesn't even measure anything except how well people do on IQ tests.

The article is pointless speculation. Boskops could have had any of a thousand genetic disadvantages that led to their downfall, but Lynch and Granger decided instead to make some guesses about how smart the Boskops might have been?


It's crap. Just like the post mortem diagnosis of Asperger's in people who died centuries ago, but moreso.


Incidentally, the wikipedia article makes the case that "Boskop man" isn't even a distinct group but is actually a misinterpretation based on four anomalous skulls.

[Johonny]

22. doesn't ever work for modern humans

So yah it's total B.S.

[phantom power]

32. +oo

[MineralMan]

6. While interesting, the article is more speculation than good

science.

There are many reasons that a population might have disappeared. These range from it being too small to survive some calamity to the population being to weak, physically, to compete with stronger, if less intelligent, competitors.

I won't go into the speculation that the larger brain size automatically indicated a higher IQ, although that may well be the case.

All it would take would be a group of strong, violent humans from another line to wander into the area where these Boskops lived to spell their end. Intelligence didn't necessarily trump other factors in that period. Not at all.

[Ian David]

7. Maybe they ascended?

[laconicsax]

8. Boo on the poster.

Atlantis sucks.

[semillama]

9. Boskops = Hogwash, unfortunately

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks takes it apart for you:
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/lynch-granger-big-brain-boskops-2008.html

[Codeine]

10. Wow. that is some seriously garbage-tastic "science" there.

Discover Magazine has some embarrassing moments.

[RagAss]

11. They were Raptured !

[Iggo]

12. We killed them, ate them, and took all their shit. (n/t)

[Dead_Parrot]

15. lol. We rule. nt

[Xipe Totec]

13. They were killed by their Republican brethren n/t

[krispos42]

14. Nearly two weeks, and nobody said the obvious?

"Idiocracy"!!!

[intergalacterrorist]

16. a lingering question we refuse to answer?

While the Discovery article is perhaps less than erudite, and the book itself is rather unfounded skepticism (currently reading it just to see)...why did the discovery of this hominid, and its subsequent research, simply get abandoned? Is it because we are too scared of the possibility that a species with greater brain functionality than ourselves might have actually existed? Sure, other "scientists" pick it apart in their scholarly way, but they are merely trying to poke holes in the legitimacy of a discovery that never even made it to the status of "hypothesis," much less to classification of a new branch of species in the homo genus.

I want to avoid sounding esoteric or ignorant, but what happened to scientific inquiry? Both evolution and creationism require some level of faith in the reasoning, analysis, and speculation that underpin them as philosophies/sciences explaining our origins. Everyone should question everything in my opinion; simply assuming something is correct because an educated (albeit sometimes arrogant) "expert" says so is folly.

Shouldn't something like the discovery of a hominid with an enormous brain capacity warrant a little more investigation and less dismissal? The boksops could provide a window into that mysterious gap of time between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago when neanderthals, homo sapiens, apparently boksops, and the as yet unclassified Denisova hominin (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/say-hello-to-x-woman-your-longlost-cousin-1926980.html) roamed the earth together.

[gtar100]

18. I'm sorry more people don't take your questioning seriously.

It seems to me some of our greatest mysteries have answers in our history between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago. By the time our history starts to record things, humans had a lot of things already in place. So many lost years. Fascinating that there is this third species. What the heck happened? I find that an incredible mystery to ponder.

[semillama]

23. See link @post 9. n/t

[intergalacterrorist]

31. so much brain bashing, yet we call ourselves geniuses, go figure...

Link in post #9? John Hawkes?...laughable. The guy hasn't even read the book and he's making arrogant comments about the science behind it. I'm almost through "Big Brain" and it isn't even really about the Boksop. It's about mammalian brain evolution; written by neuroscientists not anthropologists. I'd say they're a little more qualified to make comments about brain evolution than a paleontologist.

Lynch/Granger aren't trying to "prove" the Boksop, simply pick apart the hypothetical Boksop brain to help us learn more about our own. Possibly how we developed such complex associative mechanisms in our cortex and cortical loops, and then seemed to just stall out in terms of further cortical evolution towards higher states of emotional/associative cognition.

Idiocracy? Really? I think the more likely fate of the Boksop lay in the blood-thirsty tendencies of the homo sapien genus, not our stupidity. Sapien=wise. Who gave us the right to call ourselves wise? We name every other hominid by its region rather than rank of intelligence. I'm beginning to think homo exterminatio would have been more appropriate since we kill everything around us. Perhaps that explains the fate of the floresiensis, the denisova, and the neanderthals. I don't know enough about the floresiensis or denisova yet; however, the evidence of the increased neanderthal brain capacity, and the mysteriously enormous Boksop brain, seem to point to a different emotional circuitry. We homo sapiens are still too much like our anthropoidal cousins, who still bash each other over the head with sticks when one looks at the other the wrong way to come up with anything better. Yay evolution!

________
Question everything.

[semillama]

33. So I take it you didn't read past the part where he said he hadn't read it

and demonstrated how the whole concept of "Boskops" as a hominid species is bunk. That's not news to anyone familiar with paleoanthropology.

[supernova]

26. It would be nice

to know where these larger-brained people came from ... and went. And why we didn't develop along the same lines. Perhaps it is is as John Hawks suggests:

To be sure, there has been a reduction in the average brain size in South Africa during the last 10,000 years, and there have been parallel reductions in Europe and China -- pretty much everywhere we have decent samples of skeletons, it looks like brains have been shrinking. This is something I've done quite a bit of research on, and will continue to do so, because it's interesting. But it is hardly a sign that ancient humans had mysterious mental powers -- it is probably a matter of energetic efficiency (brains are expensive), developmental time (brains take a long time to mature) and diet (brains require high protein and fat consumption, less and less available to Holocene populations).

For me, this new book illustrates the idea that "boskop man" is a story so far without a satisfactory ending in the popular mind. I think it's quite natural to wonder that if we have the big brains that we do, how come they aren't still bigger?

[Ter]

27. You left out Homo floresiensis

The real "Hobbitt" like species.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/05/06/hobbit-species.html

[Lithos]

17. They made a movie about it

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

[Orrex]

19. I really wish that movie had been funny.

The joke was pretty much played out after about 15 minutes, when there were still about 75 minutes left to endure.


Good analogy to speculation about the "Boskops," though.

[Orrex]

20. I thought that you meant these guys

[bananas]

21. We found the monolith first. nt

[conscious evolution]

24. They invented space travel

and got the fuck out of here.
Looking at so called civilized homo sapiens,can you blame them?

[Ian David]

25. Bigger brains require a bigger birth canal for the giant head to fit through.

That means either higher infant mortality rates, or women with bigger hips.

If the hips get too big, then the women have a harder time walking- which means a harder time gathering food and evading predators.

Also, bigger brains require more food.

[RagAss]

28. Colonel Mustard with a candlestick in the study.

[Bonobo]

29. It's a trade-off.

There are a lot of trade-offs that occur to me even without thinking much about it.

-Brains require LOTS of energy, so it is a huge trade-off.
-Big brains=big heads=harder to give birth.
-Bg brains may mean a longer period of dependance on the parents.
Etc.

[Lorien]

30. Idiocracy. nt

[Ready4Change]

34. Survival is based on more than IQ.

Even if the ID estimates are accurate (huge 'if' there) survival is based on more than IQ. Could they outrun prey/predators? Could they communicate with others of their kind well enough to transfer complex ideas? Could they throw well? Could they climb well? Did they have efficient digestive systems? Did they have effective immune systems? Did they have resources at hand that would allow them to leverage their IQs? (Flint for knapping more efficient tools, for example? Was their breeding pace well matched for what their environment could provide?

Lots of issues which can overcome sheer IQ, especially for a people/culture barely above the level of animals.