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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.'"
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.
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!
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.