Were the Boskops smarter than us?
Comparison of restoration of Boskop skull next to modern human skull. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 1918
A group of prehistoric people called the Boskops by scientists might have been even smarter than modern humans.
Richard Granger: The Boskops are one instance of a set of skulls, dating from roughly ten thousand or so years ago and all with skull sizes and estimated brain sizes substantially larger than our own.
Neuroscientist Richard Granger of Dartmouth College is co-author of a new book on the origins and future of human intelligence. Not all scientists agree the Boskops species even existed. Granger speculates that – if they did exist and their brains were extra large – the Boskops might have enjoyed an enhanced mental life.
Richard Granger: We’ve all had the sensation of thinking of some topic and starting to go down some alleyway in our minds and realizing that we’ve imagined some world. It’s possible that the bigger the brain, the richer the imagined world that you can conjure.
But if the Boskops had so much brain power, why didn’t they survive?
Richard Granger: Mammals with too big a head would tend to die in childbirth at too high a rate and the species might not be viable.
I’ve always considered this a no-brainer, in a frivolous way. How many of your friends do you think would be capable of inventing, say, the bow? Or agriculture? Or metallurgy?
I don’t believe having a bigger skull means that you are smarter. It depends on how many things you are exposed as child that make you smart. Also if these people were so smart why havent we heard about them before, were are their traces of civilization or even some kind of tool never before seen. No I think that this was just some evolutionary mutation that did not work out and ended up extinct.
Do you think the Boskops could teach us something about finding more adequate ways of warning each other in the human community of impending danger? Can we learn anything from the Boskops about living in different, more sustainable ways or, on the hand, about how they “ended up extinct”?
We in the family of humanity are going to be forced to do better in our efforts to communicate in a more reality-oriented way about ominously looming threats of an human-driven, global calamity of some kind. If we keep doing precisely what our leaders are saying and doing now, the future for our children looks bleak. We can surely do more and do it better. After all, human beings are remarkably intelligent, ingenious and adaptive.
Before we can determine what new and different to do, perhaps a brief analysis of our current, distinctly human-induced, global predicament is in order. Consider for a moment some of the ways in which my generation of leaders has gone so terribly wrong.
First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.
We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of `real’ endless economic growth and soon to become unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.
Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me generation.” We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with “feet of clay.”
Perhaps we live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We will own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the world’s wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our `inalienable rights’ to outrageously consume Earth’s limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.
We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe….. thousands of greedy little kings of capital concentration, big business potentates and governmental sinecurists. We enjoy freedom and living without limits. Of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms or discussions of the existence of biophysical limitations of any kind.
We deny the existence of human limits and Earth’s limitations.
Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making….a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre.
Third, most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic `wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing…..changes that save both the economy and the Creation.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Chimps are smarter that white-tailed deer and jellyfihs. But the white-tailed deer population and jellyfish population is expanding, while the global chimp population is small and decreasing. ‘Smart’ isn’t what you need. ‘Adaptable’ is what you need.
I can believe that!
Of course – whether you’re a chimp or a jelly fish – it also helps not to have a dominant species (humans) with an ever-growing population taking over your living space.
There are stories of “giant” races in very ancient texts that might suggest that at least up to the time of the writings, certain people groups were seen by the author as much larger in stature. Perhaps some of the stories relate to Boskops.
I don’t think the Boskops disappearance (if they truly existed as a separate group) necessarily means that they went extinct. As people groups increasingly comingled and expanded in territory at the end of the last ice age, I would expect that the features and statures became averaged genetically, perhaps resulting in the size and attributes we find common today.
It would be interesting to see an artist’s representation of what they looked like. Perhaps they may resemble someone I know ;)