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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.'"
Exactly me immediate reaction. How intelligent do these guys expect an elephant to be?
I had read that around the time Man domesticated dogs, the size of their brains changed.
The theory being that since we always had dogs with us, we didn't need large parts of the brain dedicated to smell anymore.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
The skull was found in the early 1900s. There's been speculation about them for years. And NOW Discovery is writing about them? I think the better story to link to is about the giant snake they just found in a mine in South America. 40+ feet long, weighing in at over a ton, lived about 60 Million years ago, indicating that the temperature was significantly higher than it is now in the Equatorial Rain Forest.
You're right - size isn't everything (there are plenty of examples of less intelligent, larger brained animals).
Broca's and Wernicke's areas are parts of the brain for constructing and understanding language, respectively. This part of the brain is a unique part of the homo sapiens, and is why our brains our asymmetric (broca's and wernicke's is almost always on the left side of your brain). It is believed that the crucial genetic mutation that allowed for this asymmetry, also allowed for us to suffer from schizophrenia, which is believed to be due to a malfunctioning of correctly labelling thoughts versus speech versus what is heard.
But back to the point - human intelligence is, as you say, a lot to do with nuture, but this in turn is dependant on our 'nature' (language).
Then again, I've also head that the most intelligent are a particular shade of blue followed by mice, and then dolphins....
is that those who adapt quickest to a changing environment survive (not the biggest, quickest or strongest). maybe thats what happened the Boskops couldn't adapt.
The article states that the intelligence is estimated from the prefrontal cortex size. How big is that of an elephant?
Assume the hypothesis is true.
Those big brains would not have evolved without an evolutionary advantage of some sort, lack of literary hard drives or no. Now, their relative fitness against homo sapiens is another matter - that could depend on things like population size, climate change, and the accidents of history. ("The race is not always to the swift" and all that.)
I bet that, if this is true, someone starts looking for these genes in the current human population. They should be able to get some DNA from those 10,000 year old bones to compare against.
It isn't brain size they are on about, its the size of a specific region of the brain. Other mammals assign their neurological resources differently; and in the case of dolphins I imagine a lot of the extra hardware for things such as echolocation.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
60 years ago, I built a computer that took up an entire room. Amazingly, it got replaced with a smaller, more efficient model.
This is a simplistic argument made often by non-city folk. In anarchy, the populations that will win out first are those that are better organized. Better organized in terms of food distribution, against mobs, the weather elements, division of labor - you know, like city folk. And for every animal out there that the "self-sustainable" folk can go and hunt to eat, the city is that much closer to transportation that can handle heavy loads, like tons of grain, or pickled herring, or whatever.
Because make no mistake, after a brief period of panic, an economy will be put into place. There are economies in slums, in primitive societies, in war-torn and disaster-ravaged areas, there are economies upon economies and co-existing underground economies. The ones who have access to the best economic resources can put back their economy the soonest, and are the ones who will be self-sustainable.
Did they have vocal cords that were sophisticated enough to produce real language?
House cats have vocal cords that are sophisticated enough to produce real language. Once when I was married, we visited a friend out of town and crashed on his couch, the next morning we heard a child outside the door whining for help. "Help! Help!" plain as day. I opened the door and his cat walked in and said, again plain as day, "hello". Cats, however, don't have sophisticated enough brains for complex communications.
Even some birds can mimick human speech.
Further, being born with a huge head is hard on female. With out C-sections, how would a woman survive?
They would have had to have huge vaginas and usteruses, too. My last girlfriend's vagina was freakishly small, so small I could hardly have sex with her. Were it not for c-section she and her son would have both died in childbirth; there's no way a baby's head would have fit through that thing. Evolution would have done her in, just as evolution would have insured that these creatures had large enough reproductive organs to survive.
The thought just occurred to me that perhaps the precursors to humans mated with theis species; maybe the males of that species like tight pussies, the females of our precursor species liked smart guys, and that's why they went extinct?
Free Martian Whores!
The challenge there is that a familial study isn't easily extended.
Factoring out the outliers (the mentally retarded, the extremely gifted), most Homo sapiens will have more or less the same internal structure. To get meaningful comparisons, you really need to dissect the brains of both species and compare the internal structure. The most any IQ study could say is that brain size correlates to IQ within the species, where many factors remain relatively unchanged across the sample. Even in these cases, the correlation coefficient is usually 0.4, implying a weak correlation.
If both species had similar neuron density, interconnections, etc, then it would be reasonable to assume this species was more intelligent. On the other hand, if a significant difference was observed (be it through natural evolution, external forces such as dietary deficiencies, etc), they might not have been any more intelligent.
I remember seeing a few studies on this back when I took Physical Anthropology, but I can't recall offhand any of the authors. The basic conclusion amongst the physical anthropology crowd is that brain size does loosely predict intelligence, if you hold the internal structure to be constant. To get a *true* picture of the difference, though, you need to know the differences internally as well, as these are considered to be more strongly correlated.
Or they were killed off by the more aggressive Homo sapiens because they were too docile. I'm thinking the Puppeteers had their hooves in this.
Perhaps most important:
It would seem John Hawks has thoroughly debunked the idea.
Nah, it's just Jocks vs. Nerds a few millenia ago.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"any opportunity to reduce that cost will be aggressively pursued by evolution. "
no, not really. Only when it's to large to fit current evolutionary pressures will it favor random mutations the may occur. If pressure means your brain needs to be smaller, and the needed random mutation do not happen, the species will go extinct.
I dislike any analogy abuote volutin that implies it has a goal or destiny. That alone has confused evolution understanding more then anything else.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on