"Boskop Man": Was There an Extinct Breed of Humans With an Intellectual Capacity Far Surpassing Our Own?

Macmillan publishing have brought us a book on the hyper-intelligent Boskop species, an extinct breed of humans with an intellectual capacity far surpassing our own.  It's a stirring tale of amazing abilities and wonderful creatures; tales featuring fictional creatures usually are.

Most sources reporting on this offshoot species mention the fact that 'The term "Boskop Man" is no longer used by anthropologists', brushing it off like it's a minor technical dispute over naming conventions.  It is not. 

Anthropologists no longer use the term because anthropologists only study versions of human that actually existed.  The study of the super-smart Boskop is the same as physical study of phlogiston - it seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that we know what we're doing it's time to drop the subject.  The bulk of academic material on the super-smart hominid comes from the 1920s.  Considering the average scientific paper of the time started with "Far be it from me to dispute the esteemed opinions of the honoured Sir Fotherington-Smythe the Third", it wasn't exactly a hotbed of keen peer review.

The Boskob buggered off out of scientific literature for good in the fifties, when an anthropologist noted that these skulls sorta-kinda looked just like those modern peoples like the San and Hottentot. Modern peoples who have been kind enough not to enslave us with their megabrained hypertechnology just yet.  This view is echoed by modern neurophysiologists such as William Calvin.

Not that the book is without merit.  It's written by a psychiatrist and a cognitive scientist, people who might just have something interesting to say about the brain, and the actual neuroscience is accurate and interesting.  It's just a pity they've been driven to sell it on the back of something that isn't there.  Like being forced to explain fusion in a book titled "The Abominable Snowman's Energy Source".   The fundamental flaw, the assumption that a bigger brain automatically means increased intelligence, is more suited to Dr Freud than a modern professor - and embarrassingly crude launching point for a discussion of sophisticated mental processes.  A sperm whale brain is 6 kilograms of raw neural matter capable of little more than "swim.  eat.  repeat", while Albert Einstein's skullbox was actually a smidgen smaller than average.

The point is not the volume of the brain, but the complexity of the wiring.  The critical factor is the number of connections between different neurons, massively enhanced in humans by the distinctive folding pattern which increases the surface area of our brains.  Animal brains have far fewer folds, down to the lower species which have no folds at all, just clumps of neurons.

Just like the old saying: "It's not the size that counts, it's how you use it to create a massively complicated neural network capable of planning and independent thought".

Posted by Luke McKinney.

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Story Links:

Boskop Book
William Calvin website

Comments

[ShadyAcres]

"It's not the size that counts, it's how you use it to create a massively complicated neural network capable of planning and independent thought".

I've used this line before...

didn't work.

[knoxvilledaniel]

Maybe a future human will be able to pack more memory into the 3 pounds of tissue in the human skull than we can now without increasing the size of said cranium & looking like something from another planet. After all, our electronic creations used to take up entire warehouses, & now they can fit on a desktop, laptop, palmtop. Perhaps the brains that created them can do likewise.

[knoxvilledaniel]

& I don't think a breed of human from our past would go extinct. If
Boskop Man had existed, we would have been his descendants & inherited his abilities & mental prowess.

[taterHed]

If they were so smart howcome they're extinct?

[Rob]

The authors of the book you're referring to point out that its not absolute brain size but relative brain size (i.e. brain mass or volume relative to body mass or volume). It isn't a simple matter of folding the brain to increase surface area. Receiving afferent sensory projections and sending efferent motor projections in a huge body (like a whale) requires longer and thicker neural axons. Thus, to some degree, when evolutionary adaptation selects for increased body size it needs to select for a correponding increase in the capacity to control that larger body. It's the relative measure of brain volume that that the authors are referring to. My guess is if you compare whales with humand along the relative measure of brain size humans win. That isn't to say that connectivity doesn't matter: The cortical grey matter of a whale is quite a bit thinner than ours.

As a reply to one of the respondents, an application of Jared Diamond's Thesis may explain Boskop man's extinction (and our survival). Southern Africa is a rather unique environment: its geography limits it variability of flora and fauna as well as the flow of technology, culture, etc.. Eurasian geography, on the other hand, and environment placed Eurasians in a better position for 'technological' advances (domestication/husbandry, agriculture, metallurgy, etc.) and the spread and widespread use of advances. Perhaps Boskops were out-competed by waves of 'technologically superior' humans migrating into Southern Africa.