Boskop Man

Boskops were a race of hominids with small faces and giant brains, who roamed the Earth 10,000 years ago.  The mystery about their existence and extinction was recently covered in an article in Discover magazine, spurred by the recent publication of a book about human brain capacity.

The only problem?  Boskops never existed.

I recently wrote about Stephen Jay Gould's classic book, The Mismeasure of Man.  I don't have a copy handy, so I can't double check, but if Gould didn't cover Boskops, then he really should have.  The Boskop story could have been custom created from that text.

Luckily, science completely and thoroughly debunked the Boskop story by the late 1930s.  So why does it keep turning up, like a bad penny?  No one can say; least of all the highly respected neuroscientists who have stepped onto the national stage to breathlessly proclaim the mysteries of the Boskops.

In 1913, some farmers in a small South African town named Boskop unearthed a uniquely large skull when they were working the soil.  This skull had some unusual features, including a small face, and a very large domed brain case.  Scientists speculated that the skull had at least 30% more brain capacity than a regular human skull.

Problem #1 is that the Boskop skull was not complete.  Only about a third of the skull was found; everything else was speculation.  Without having the complete skull, it must be admitted that reconstructions are not a guarantee of success.

Problem #2 is that somehow anthropologists of the time got the idea that this skull represented a separate race of hominids.  This was a dark time in human history, and racial stuff was huge.  Anthropologists liked to separate remains into different "races," which they had essentially invented on the spot.  

Problem #3 is what happened next.  Whenever someone found an unusually large hominid skull, it got lumped into the "Boskop race."  Now one thing that most people don't realize is that there is a lot of variation in the size of humans, even their bone structure.  

As a knitter, I am familiar with this phenomenon, because I have to measure people's heads in order to knit hats that fit them.  I have one friend (who shall remain unnamed) whose noggin is an astounding 28 inches around.  An average guy's head is more like 25 or 26 inches around.  My friend with the giant head is not so unusual, either.

So the way that the Boskop race was defined in the early 1900s is similar to going around the world today, measuring everyone's heads, and telling the people with big craniums that they are actually Boskops.  Ridiculous!

One very odd turn the Discovery article takes is when it mentions that "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."

Whoa!  This passage puts the article square in the territory of pseudoscience, something that better belongs on the Art Bell show than Discover magazine.  Wonders never cease!