Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Mmmmmmmm Brains
Evolution may favour the most clever and the most adaptable, but this homonid suffered from one utterly fatal genetic flaw: it was delicious.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Exactly me immediate reaction. How intelligent do these guys expect an elephant to be?
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskop_Man
The Discover article is a bunch of garbage. the idea that this was some sort of homonid species has been debuniked over 50 years ago.
If I recall my Carl Sagan reading, Broca's Region is very important to our intellectual prowess among the animal kingdom. But from reading this summary it would seem that a blue whale would be the most intelligent thing ever. But it's not and that's because things like the proteins that make up our neurons, the spacing of the synapses, the quality of the electric shielding (white matter), etc are also important to defining our brain functions above that of an animal with comparable brain size.
I'm in now way a biologist but it is odd to me that they would suggest this metric for intelligence unless they can also prove that they are recent enough in our history that the above factors I mentioned have to be close or match our own that we know a lot about. I don't think that's a safe speculation though.
I would also like to point out the nature versus nurture paradigm in how a brain develops which will show you that in our idea of what an IQ test is, parental nurturing can sometimes have just as large if not more important result than our genetic make up.
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
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.
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.
humans with big brains... they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens
A triumph of wedgies and swirlies paving the way for the modern day high school.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, I'm sure they found it easy to create a standardized and unbiased IQ test for an extinct family based solely on their postulated brain size. *snicker*
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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?
So there you have it. There wasn't an extinct hominid with an IQ of 150, it was just the fallacy of selection bias exhibited by some anthropologists more than 70 years ago.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
Take a peek... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/61/Ele-brain.png
The brain seems larger, but seeing as the pre-frontal cortex isn't marked its relative size is difficult to guess. It is also worth bearing in mind that elephants are pretty intelligent animals.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Actually, the idea of a "Boskop race" or "Boskop Man" is long discredited. The hypothesis occurred by actively selecting the larger skulls from the available set, and misclassifying them as a distinct population.
It turns out that by examining the whole set of preserved skulls, cranium size distributions are similar in South Africa, Europe, and China for the period in question. Skulls of that era with rather large crania (comparable to the Boskop specimens) can be found in all regions.
Cranium size distributions are similar between those regions today also, but the distributions have shifted to slightly smaller sizes than they were around 10000 BCE (probably due to agriculture & civilization). http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/lynch-granger-big-brain-boskops-2008.html
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
And Einsteins prefontal cortex was much smaller than average. However he is arguably among the smartest humans to have ever lived.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Huh? The brain is the most costly organ for the body to run, any opportunity to reduce that cost will be aggressively pursued by evolution. The size of the brain matters *drastically* for evolution purposes...
Exactly how many paper hats did you keep trying on until you realized you would break them, genius? ;-)
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
What he world needs is an advanced predator species to thin the idiots out of the herd. Maybe a robotic puma or something.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
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.
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.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Islam does repress women. Repressed women tend to have less education. Uneducated women tend to have more children than educated ones.
Ergo, muslims outbreed non-muslims. It's why France is the only European country that doesn't have a falling birthrate. Spend some time in the Parisian banlieue and see it with your own eyes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Different areas of the brain handle different tasks - the back of the brain is where the visual center is, while the sides are where the audio recognition/speech centers are (as determined from individuals who have lost parts of their brains from surgery, accidents or diseases).
The insular cortex seems to have been the most recent part of the brain to have evolved.
It isn't so much brain size alone, as the ratio of brain size to body size that seems to be a measure of intelligence. There seems to be a minimum amount of brain volume required to manage the metabolism and immune system of body of a certain mass, so any excess about that amount has some other purpose like cognitive thinking, memory, recognition.
These can be placed in a graph:
Graph #1
Graph #2
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
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.
You know you're a nerd when your IQ is a larger number than your bench press. :)
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
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.
Either that or they discovered WOW and stopped breeding.
"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
Einstein did not have some intimate insight on how the universe worked, he made mistakes on even basic principles (heat capacity comes to mind).
Really? In what way. Wiki states:
But experiments at low temperatures showed that the heat capacity changes, going to zero at absolute zero. As the temperature goes up, the specific heat goes up until it approaches the Dulong and Petit prediction at high temperature. By employing Planck's quantization assumption, Einstein's theory accounted for the observed experimental trend for the first time. Together with the photoelectric effect, this became one of the most important evidence for the need of quantization. Einstein used the levels of the quantum mechanical oscillator many years before the advent of modern quantum mechanics.
Seems like it was mostly correct to me.
He made some great discoveries, but also had a wasteland of failed ideas.
Thats a bold statement. Back this up please.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Maybe surrounded by other intellectuals they discovered a way to escape the planet or call other intelligent species from other planets to get them out of here. Then come back every once in a while and give us anal probes.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
But Einstein's model was not wrong - before him, there was no model at all. The Debye model is a minor correction in that there are multiple frequencies instead of just one. The Debye model corrects for extremely low temperatures - it is inaccurate at intermediate temperatures.
assuming the universe was not changing until Hubble's discovery
What do you mean? Hubble's expanding universe theory is consistent with Einstein's general relativity.
his flawed challenges to QM in the Bohr-Einstein debates
QM is bases on Einsteins discoveries, but QM is flawed, especially the uncertainty principle which is the part Einstein had a problem with. Here's an example of the problem with uncertainty: Uncertainty states you cannot know both an objects position and velocity at the same time. This also extends to the complete absence of particles, so if you know there is quantity zero of something, you then know the position but by definition you can then not know how fast that nothing is going.
error in clock synchronization for Special Relativity
Clock synchronization is a thought experiment. Those that claim the clock synchonization are wrong are using it to (incorrectly) show that the speed of light is not a constant. Einstein was not wrong here - the speed of light is constant.
a number of failures in proofs including E=mc^2
Not failures - mistakes. He always admitted he was poor in math. I'd like to see you do better.
Even what he considered his greatest mistake - the cosmological constant - new research shows that this constant my be necessary after all.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.