I was just reading The dreams of dragons: an exploration and celebration of the mysteries of nature by Lyall Watson. He described how when he was a boy he excavated a grave in a mound on the seashore of South Africa and found a skeleton with very small bones and teeth but a huge cranium. Later he found out that this skeleton belonged to Boskop Man, who has been extinct for maybe 10,000 years.
Watson recalled how Homo sapiens became differentiated from other primates by having a larger brain and less robust bones. If that trend is extrapolated into the future, you can imagine humans having even bigger brains and smaller bones. But, he said, the man of the future has already lived. And died.
Boskop Man had a bigger brain than modern Homo sapiens. However, they had no technology and built no buildings. Their graves show careful placement of the body with mother-of-pearl gifts placed in the hand.
This is fascinating. One may speculate on what those people did with all their intelligence there on the seashore. Waston imagined them discovering altered states of consciousness, since an intelligent brain has to occupy itself with something. I Googled to find out more information about Boskop Man, but there’s hardly anything on the web. Do any of you know about this?
I don’t want to bring Dr. Mengele into this conversation(AT ALL) but I will do so only for the sake of resolving an issue that I have been questioning as of late.
I recall seeing a photograph somewhere of one of Mengele’s patients; a small child with an extremely large cranium, about the size of a watermelon. I was led to believe that Dr. Mengele had injected hormones into the boy’s brain to induce brain cell growth. I believe it did do just that: the brain tissues and surrounding skull ballooned to more than twice regular size, yet I don’t remember hearing anything about extended mental capabilities, Mengele’s original intention.
Has anyone else heard about this specific experiment? The reason that I brought it up is that it is the only example I can recall that of a human being with an extremely large brain, mass at least, but not necessarily brain cell or concentration of receptors.
Cranial capacity is not directly related to intelligence. H. sap neanderthalis on average had a higher cranial capacity (~1450 cubic centimeters) than H. sap. sap. (~1350 cc).
More important than brute size are the convolutions which increase the surface area of the cerbral cortex. It’s hard to read that out of fossils, but I read somewhere that Neanderthals probably had smoother brains, therefore, less brain power. I imagine something similar is true for Boskop Man.
I haven’t read Watson but I recall Loren Eiseley writing about Boskop, maybe in The Immense Journey.
Eiseley, while an engaging writer, was not a specialist in paleoanthropology, and a quick look at Watson’s bio shows he’s not either, so I would be slow to credit unreviewed claims by either regarding cranial capacity, dentition, or dating of any specimen they cite.
On the other hand no one has a detailed view of the sequence of human evolution, so who knows?
There is good news and bad news.
Good news --a Google search for “mengele cranium hormones” brought up a hit.
Bad news --“The Page Cannot Be Found”.
Good news --“Open the http://www.illuminati-news.com home page, and then look for links to the information you want.”
Bad news --we’re too late.
Good news --Google has it cached.
Bad news --there’s nothing in there about Mengele injecting hormones into a boy’s brain.
Good news --there’s this.
Your orthodontist is working for the Gray Men, you know.
This doesn’t sound right to me. I have always heard that the skull size of modern homo sapiens is effectively limited by pelvis size–modern women ain’t gonna be birthin’ no babies with sigificantly bigger heads because their hips are not wide enough. If this Boskop Man had even smaller bones, it just doesn’t seem to add up.
Unless, of course, the fossils of Boskop Man’s skull are really brilliantly executed cranial manipulations designed by the illuminati.
I recently took a course on Physical Anthropology, and one of the features of the various “ancestors” of H. Sapiens Sapiens that I was never able to memorize was cranial capacity, which is in general a good indication of brain size. I do remember that several precursors to H. sap sap (hmm, that abbreviation has some merit) had cranial capacities quite larger than our own. Lacking my textbook, I can’t recall specifics off the top of my head (I’ll look for a good cite on the web) but some of the robust australopithecines, for instance, and the forementioned H. Sapiens Neandertalensis (or H. Neandertalensis, depending on which side of that argument you’re on).
It is my understanding that the general consensus is that brain size has little or nothing to do with brain capacity and/or mental facility. (Wow, did I put enough implied disclaimers in there?)
The idea that the human head will just keep getting bigger is a fine example of orthogenesis, the idea that past developmental trends in a species will continue ad infinitum. Gould discusses this and a whole passel of other topics related to evolution in Ever Since Darwin.
If cranial size was directly proportional to inteligence, then men would typically be smarter than women. After all, men are generally larger and thus composed of larger parts. Of course, studies too numerous to bother citing or linking to have proven that men and women have equal inteligence
Exactly. The interesting thing is that Boskopoids do not fit into the linear Darwinian concept of human evolution. Anything that doesn’t fit in with established teaching is interesting. I revel in the quirky, the unorthodox, drawing outside the lines. Even if it doesn’t necessarily prove anything.
In Watson’s favor, he studied under Dart, who was the preeminent paleoanthropologist of South Africa.
Watson did not give any date for Boskop Man. The estimate of 10,000 years BP is what I found on some web site while I was looking around, so I can’t vouch for its accuracy. I just didn’t find any other dates.
The extra-large cranium contrasted with a small, extra-gracile frame is not an impossibility. It does require 1) a shorter gestation and 2) rapid cranial growth in the first couple years after birth. Which is how present H. sapiens was able to get the cranium as big as it is now. In the last months of pregnancy, the baby’s head growth slows down; in the first year after birth, the brain triples in size. This also explains the prolonged period of human childhood and adolescence. Human heads retain infantile features (compared to other primates) into adulthood. No heavy brow ridges, no massive mandibles, and the cranial sutures never close entirely.
For Boskopoids to give birth, obviously there would have been an upper limit on head size at birth, but they could have had extra-rapid cranial growth during infancy & early childhood.
As for the starchild.com site, Mr. Pye believes he has found an “alien-human hybrid.” Harrumph. Applying the Razor, that extra-large Mexican cranium he describes could simply be a mutation within the range of human possibility. He estimates if the child had lived to adulthood, it would have had 1800 cc. Average modern humans have 1400. Boskopoid cranial size, according to Watson, was 30% bigger than ours.
What I will have to do is go to the library and see if I can find any corroboration from Dr. Dart.
I recently heard a theory that suggested that H. Sapiens survived the evolutionary struggle for one reason: We had dogs. According to the theory, competitors to H. Sapiens may have actually had larger brains, but because man domesticated the dog, we were able to dedicate more of our brain to higher intellectual functions because we no longer needed our noses and hearing as much. Over time, those senses atrophied to some degree and more of our brain power was used to develop our reasoning powers. And while we were busy evolving, our dogs were protecting us and magnifying our labor to make us more competitive.
In essence, man and dog then formed a symbiotic pair, and evolved together. Other humanoid competitors might have been better than us, but they weren’t better than the man/dog combination.
I don’t know how seriously this theory is being taken, but it sure makes me look at my Border Collie with a bit more respect and admiration.
I searched Google Groups on the hunch that this has been discussed in sci.anthropology.paleo. It was, but the quote below actually comes from sci.archeology. Make of it what you will. I tried to find the Singer article online, but I couldn’t.
If you aren’t convinced that brain size has little to do with intelligence, get a copy of Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” Heck, even if you are get a copy and read it – it’s in my opinion one of the best pieces of ammunition for fighting ignorance there is. Just skim over all the parts where he goes into factor analysis and other statistical esoterica, and read about all the ways researchers have conciously and unconciously distorted their data to get results ‘proving’ the mental inferiority of whatever group they didn’t like at the time. Great book on both intelligence testing in particular and how science is affected by cultural biases in general. OK that concludes our gushing recommendation for the day. Thank you for listening.
--a Google search for “mengele cranium hormones” brought up a hit.
--“The Page Cannot Be Found”.