Posted on 12/31/2009 9:53:37 AM PST by Fractal Trader
In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa.
These Afrikaner farmers, to their lasting credit, had the presence of mind to notice that there was something distinctly odd about the bones. They brought the find to Frederick W. Fitz Simons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.
The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.
The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors.
(Excerpt) Read more at discovermagazine.com ...
GGG ping.
THEIR MALES ALL MARRIED EACH OTHER AND HAD NO CHILDREN. AIN’T SURVIVAL OF THE SPECIES A BITCH?
They are on that island with Elvis and JFK.
Interesting story. I would suspect that they had a deficient gene called liberalitis that did them in.
We took to alcohol and blogging to dumb ourselves down to happy. There is a House episode about it.
I won’t say it, but I’m thinking it! Bump.
Rising expectations...
An enormous brain no more makes one a great thinker than an enormous d**k makes one a great lover. It’s what you do with what you’ve got that counts.
On the other hand, all other things being equal, bigger is better. Or, at least, that’s what my ex-wife says.
Their mothers died in childbirth.
In any event, brain size does not necessarily correspond to a 150 IQ. Albert Einstein did not have a big head.
Better to be lucky than good.
Large brains, childlike? I think that these people are still amongst us. They are called Liberals.
Harvardus Facultius
Turns out Albert Einstein did have a larger skull: http://www.crystalinks.com/einstein.html
Maybe they were socialists.
By this reasoning, elephants should be earth’s smartest land creatures.
I have big feet.
It’s the ratio that’s important, not absolute size. Elephants have enormous brains because every square inch of skin, muscle etc etc has X number of nerve cells that the brain needs to communicate with. If there was a hominid close to our size, but with a substantially larger brain, it would be indicative of intelligence.
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