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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.'"
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?
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.
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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?
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.
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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
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.
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.
"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc...and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."
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Either that or they discovered WOW and stopped breeding.