Scientists Postulate Extinct Hominid With 150 IQ

Hugh Pickens writes "Neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger have an interesting article in Discover Magazine about the Boskops, an extinct hominid that had big eyes, child-like faces, and forebrains roughly 50% larger than modern man indicating they may have had an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens. The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to 'alien abductors' in movies. Naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote: 'Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain.' The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the almost irresistible idea that evolution leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessor, yet the existence of the Boskops argues otherwise — that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens — that is, ourselves. 'With 30 percent larger brains than ours now, 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,' write Lynch and Granger. But why did they go extinct? 'Maybe all that thoughtfulness was of no particular survival value in 10,000 BC. Lacking the external hard drive of a literate society, the Boskops were unable to exploit the vast potential locked up in their expanded cortex,' write Lynch and Granger. 'They were born just a few millennia too soon.'"

Comments

Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ?

[rotide]

Does a bigger brain necessarily mean they had a higher IQ? Does it really work like that? I get there could be the _potential_ for a higher IQ, but just because someone has more gray matter doesn't necessarily mean they are smarter.

Re:Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ?

[Anonymous Coward]

A dolphin, the mammal with one of the largest brains out there, is NOT smarter then a human.

By what measure? As far as can be told, Dolphin's apply their brains to different types of activities and problems to humans. I can imagine having tests that compare dolphin intelligence levels relative to other dolphins, and of course there are tests that purport to measure human intelligence levels relative to other humans, but I doubt you could create any meaningful unified scale for comparing humans to dolphins. Where would you start?

Re:Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ?

[qbzzt]

Intelligence is always useful.

Not if it costs something. For example, IIRC the human brain takes 20% of a human's energy budget. If these hominids had bigger brains, they needed more food to keep them fed. More intelligence, in return for requiring more food to survive, may not be a good tradeoff.

Re:Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ?

[bcrowell]

Yep, the article is total nonsense.

If you compare across species, there is some correlation between brain size and intelligence, but not much. For instance, a whale's brain is a lot bigger than a human's, but there's no evidence that whales are all that much smarter than humans. Hamsters' brains are a lot smaller than horses', but they aren't dramatically dumber. The correlation gets somewhat stronger if you rate each species in terms of the ratio of brain size to body size. But in any case, the correlation is fairly weak, and is only a cross-species correlation. If you compare humans, there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence. Women have smaller heads than men on the average, but they're not less intelligent. The scientific consensus is that Boskop is not a separate species from H. Sapiens. Even if it was, the cross-species correlation is extremely loose, so you can't infer anything about one specific species. By the way, neanderthals also had bigger brains than humans, but the evidence is that they weren't any more intelligent. For example, there are areas where neanderthals and humans lived side by side for thousands of years, using identical types of tools. If the neanderthals were that much smarter than the humans, you'd think they'd have had fancier tools. Later on, humans started using more sophisticated tools (e.g., fish hooks and needles carved from bone), but IIRC the big-brained neanderthals never did.

Human intelligence depends a lot on specific genes, such as FOXP2. These genes have dramatic effects on intellectual ability, e.g., verbal ability. Families with abnormal FOXP2 have problems with language, but their brains are normal in size, and you wouldn't be able to tell them from normal humans based on their skulls. When you splice FOXP2 into mice, the baby mice vocalize differently than normal mice. But again, you wouldn't be able to tell the mice were abnormal based on their skulls. FOXP2 has been sequenced from DNA from Neanderthal fossils at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the result is that neanderthals have the same FOXP2 as modern humans. Note that they had to use molecular biology to find this out, though; you can't detect it by any amount of staring at the fossilized skulls.

We know how things go in our Idiocracy

[erroneus]

The smarter people will invariably be the minority overridden by the less smart masses for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways. One only has to look at the dark ages to see that in action. And every time we see politics manipulate science we see more of the same.

If 10,000 years ago a bunch of rock throwers witnessed the "magic" of these smarter people, they too might have believed they were evil or a threat to be destroyed.

With all that said, the premise of the discussion is completely guess-work. Big brain doesn't mean big mind.

Re:We know how things go in our Idiocracy

[4D6963]

The smarter people will invariably be the minority overridden by the less smart masses for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways.

Persecution complex much? Just about everything you just whined about is utter bullshit. The smart have always ruled. The smart generals have triumphed from the less gifted leaders, helped by the inventions of the smart engineers, enabled by the discoveries of the smart scientists. Don't let your historical shortsightedness and your obsession with modern day American conservatives or even your movie-watching make you think otherwise.

Re:IQ is a relative scale, not an objective one

[bsDaemon]

Well, a dollar is a dollar, a pound is a pound and a euro is a euro... until you start measuring one against the other. 100 on the IQ scale for Boskops is 150 on the scale for us.

Brain size and birth

[TheRaven64]

Homo Sapiens' brains are as large as they can get without being a significant disadvantage. The large cranial size causes problems in birth, reducing the number of individuals that survive the process and reduces the reproduction rate. A hominid with a larger brain size but not major other physiological changes would reproduce even more slowly and would be easy to kill off as a species, even if the adults males were harder to kill individually (the adult females would die in childbirth a lot more frequently than their smaller-skulled equivalents).

If, on the other hand, the rest of his skeleton was proportionally larger, then this would not have been a problem. He would have been stronger, but possibly less able agile, and would have required more food. In times of relative food shortage, the smaller-skeletoned variant would have had an evolutionary advantage. He would be able to keep his muscle mass sufficient to move around quickly on a much more limited diet.

There is quite a bit of evidence that skull sizes have been shrinking over the last few thousand years, but there's no evidence that this correlates with reduced mental ability. Humans are far from having the largest brains of any modern mammals (whales win that one by a long way). You can't jump straight from brain size to IQ, you need to also look at how the brain is divided. Dogs, for example, have a huge amount of their brain devoted to controlling their noses. Dolphins have about as much brain tissue just devoted to turning sonar returns into a coherent picture of their environment as humans have in total. It's possible that a hominid with a 50% larger brain had an average IQ of 150, but it's also possible that it had an average IQ of 200 or of 50. It's impossible to tell just from the skull.

Re:One problem ...

[ultranova]

If evolution only favored big complex beings like ourselves, all the millions of other life forms which inhabit the earth, totaling a far greater mass than us, wouldn't be around.

We aren't in competition with most bacteria (or viruses), so it doesn't really make sense to say that evolution favours one over other.

The bacteria and viruses of today are more evolved than us, having been doing it for far longer.

The bacteria and viruses of today have exactly as long evolutionary history than us.

And the concept of "more evolved" doesn't really make sense. "Better adapted" does, as does "more complex", but "more evolved" doesn't mean anything because, all together now, "evolution doesn't have a goal, so there's no way to say which entity is more and which less evolved".

Re:Yes we all know size is everything...

[aurispector]

Einstein's brain had an unusually large number or glial cells which support neuronal function. It's the brain equivalent of cardiovascular conditioning due to aerobic exercise although it's not clear if they facilitated or resulted from complex intellectual pursuits.

The idea that hominids got dumber is kind of charming but isn't supported by measuring cranial volume. If these early hominids with large brains are postulated to be ancestors of modern humans, it's possible the larger brains were evolutionarily pared down. An analogy might be an early creature with very large wings that was an ancestor of one with smaller, more efficient wings that enabled faster, more agile flight.

Re:more evolved means better

[COMON$]

Incorrect. You have to look at evolution like a ruler, there is no de-evolution or unanimously superior trait. You simply have favorable traits for a given environment. By favorable you just mean that they were able to breed more successfully and survive the environment than their competitors. However, if a species were able to get around the concept of traditional breeding such as by cloning or some method that doesnt require both parents you would see a different mechanism for success. IT would also shift if we figured out how to stop aging. But your point is somewhat correct, viewpoints that encourage breeding will have an advantage. However if those more successful breeders keep killing themselves off due to being unable to integrate into their environment, they will not succeed as well as their more adaptable brethren.

But I am not a biologist so what do I know. I do know in the US the Conservatives will kick the crap out of Liberals unless the liberals start breeding better.