Scientists Postulate Extinct Hominid With 150 IQ 568
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.'"
Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:2, Funny)
Oh, and in before "IT'S... IQ OVER 9000"
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly me immediate reaction. How intelligent do these guys expect an elephant to be?
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Insightful)
Take a peek... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/61/Ele-brain.png [wikimedia.org]
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.
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Insightful)
And Einsteins prefontal cortex was much smaller than average. However he is arguably among the smartest humans to have ever lived.
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah, it's just Jocks vs. Nerds a few millenia ago.
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:5, Funny)
Either that or they discovered WOW and stopped breeding.
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:5, Funny)
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I know this is unpopular, but Enistien made his discovers due to an extremely high degree of persistence. His IQ was not the main factor. Read is letters. He has some pretty tough times with some of the math and had to be guided through it.
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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At best De Pretto might have a case at claiming a subset of special relativity. However General Relativity, which is Einstein's masterpiece, is a completely different ballgame. No one but Einstein understood GR when he proposed it, not even David Hilbert.
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [brynmawr.edu]
Graph #2 [pharyngula.org]
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I guess it didn't involve screwing ... she wouldn't have noticed. Or maybe it did, and that was the problem.
Where's the "WTF?!" mod when you need it?
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...big eyes, child-like faces...
which reminds me of some anime characters
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I think the question is, how intelligent do the elephants expect these guys to be?
Boskop Man = Discredited Hypothesis (Score:5, Informative)
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 [johnhawks.net]
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"Exactly me immediate reaction. How intelligent do these guys expect an elephant to be?"
Actually the elephants have calculated the fate of the universe and realize it's all pointless, they are secretly laugh at us all!
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Thank you for sharing your uninformed scientific opinion with us.
In fact, humans with larger brains tend to have higher IQs. Whales have a different brain structure, so your comparison of whale to human intelligence based on brain size alone is absurd.
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly how many paper hats did you keep trying on until you realized you would break them, genius? ;-)
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:5, Informative)
You know you're a nerd when your IQ is a larger number than your bench press. :)
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Using Pounds as a unit of measuring mass just proves that you aren't intelligent :)
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Insightful)
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*
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Funny)
What he world needs is an advanced predator species to thin the idiots out of the herd. Maybe a robotic puma or something.
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Interesting)
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No, not officially. First of all there is the also the variance. Even if bigger brains means smarter on average that doesn't mean the largest brain is also the smartest. Second, there is the known fact that in humans, men has larger brains than women, which means this subject is a no go zone; any serious scientist that suggest it is quickly discredited.
OTOH. There are some evidence that suggest the neanderthal (who had 10% larger brains) was smarter than humans b
There is skepticism of the "Boskops" genius (Score:3, Informative)
Just so people know, there is skepticism [johnhawks.net] over the existence of some ancient race of geniuses based on this skull.
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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...
Re:Yes we all know size is everything... (Score:4, Interesting)
"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.
survival of the hungry (Score:4, Funny)
Re:survival of the hungry (Score:4, Funny)
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Even with larger brain pans the discription of them as being more complex may not infact be a completely true statement. Did they have vocal cords that were sophisticated enough to produce real language? Did they all have something akin to autism spectrum disorder. Did the added brain capacity lead to any actual increase in computational, creative or otherwise survival enhancing benifit over Homo Sapien? Or, as maybe more likely, it was useless fatty tissue that wasn't utalized and became a burden. His
Re:survival of the hungry (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
If only evolution worked that way (Score:3, Informative)
Evolution would have done her in, just as evolution would have insured that these creatures had large enough reproductive organs to survive.
Except evolution doesn't work that way. It doesn't work to assure survival. It does what's easiest given the array of choices that arise through mutation - including selecting a dead-end.
It's more likely that a significant jump in infant cranial size would have resulted in a significant jump in failed births unless the mutation for the large brain coincided in the same individuals who have the wider hips and reproductive organs.
That would be like someone winning two lotteries on the same day - it's extremely unlikely. Not impossible, but way less likely than winning only one lottery.
Re:brain size != survial (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Giant Panda, Eats nothing but Bamboo, Herbivore, Helpless tiny young.
Though Giant Pandas are too dumb to live...
One problem ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:One problem ... (Score:5, Insightful)
We aren't in competition with most bacteria (or viruses), so it doesn't really make sense to say that evolution favours one over other.
The bacteria and viruses of today have exactly as long evolutionary history than us.
And the concept of "more evolved" doesn't really make sense. "Better adapted" does, as does "more complex", but "more evolved" doesn't mean anything because, all together now, "evolution doesn't have a goal, so there's no way to say which entity is more and which less evolved".
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Apparently the bacteria are quicker at learning grammar.
Re:One problem ... (Score:4, Informative)
The bacteria and viruses of today have exactly as long evolutionary history than us.
No, they have much much much more ancestors than us. Evolution is not a matter of years, but of generations.
Re:more evolved means better (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Islam does repress women.
People who interpret Islam incorrectly repress women. Just like some Christian fundamentalists insist the women should stay home and look after the children (and not use birth control cause thats killing babies). Same thing.
I agree with the last two statements, but that is independent of religion.
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I would think it is more accurate to say that religion influences culture, then culture in turn reinterprets religion.
Not all Christians share an identical (or even similar) culture.
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Yes, but you have to remember that Christianity was used to stop slavery and persecution of gays as well. Christianity is a two edged sword, and the edge of Christ the redeemer usually wins out in the long run.
Basically no matter what religion you believe in, it can be twisted to support any point of view. Thats the problem with trying to interpret and do what God wants when God isn't actually telling anyone to do anything.
The world will be a lot better place to live when everyone realizes that different religions are just various interpretations of the SAME THING, and the only thing people are fighting about are their own human-based ideals.
So yeah, the muslims are pissed off about the Crusades, but what about the part that the Levant was actually CHRISTIAN LAND FIRST
How could the lands possibly be Christian when the land and its people
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I think your sense of ridiculousness stems from the idea that islam taking over the earth is undesirable.
No, I would have said the same thing if you said Christianity, or Buddhism or Atheism will take over the world. It's a silly statement to make.
It would be the same as if someone said 'Murder rates are up 4% this year. If trends continue, the entire city will be dead in 12 years'
Christianity swept most of Europe at one point looking to be the dominant world religion. Of course that also plunged us into several hundred years of what we now call the 'dark ages' where science was deemed to be against god and
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Actually, their flaw was probably being arrogant and condescending.
A good number of Slashdotters should take heed. You days are numbered!
Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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While more gray matter isn't a direct cause of more brain power, we do know a little about how different parts of the brain work and which are more useful for what. This creature has a lot more volume in the upper brain area, where more conscious thoughts and memories take place. If it were just a bigger head overall, sure it wouldn't point to something inherently 'smarter'. However, with more of the 'right stuff' in it's head it is highly likely that it was smarter than comparable creatures with smaller
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The two are loosely correlated. A much more important indicator than size is the complexity of the brain's internal structure. Density of neurons, number of interconnections, etc. To put a tech spin on it, a larger CPU might mean more processing power, but if it has fewer transistors per square inch, the computing power won't be any higher. These IQ comparisons always hold the internal structure to be constant.
By comparison, Homo neanderthalensis had a larger brain than Homo sapiens, on average. But while t
Re:Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ? (Score:4, Interesting)
The challenge there is that a familial study isn't easily extended.
Factoring out the outliers (the mentally retarded, the extremely gifted), most Homo sapiens will have more or less the same internal structure. To get meaningful comparisons, you really need to dissect the brains of both species and compare the internal structure. The most any IQ study could say is that brain size correlates to IQ within the species, where many factors remain relatively unchanged across the sample. Even in these cases, the correlation coefficient is usually 0.4, implying a weak correlation.
If both species had similar neuron density, interconnections, etc, then it would be reasonable to assume this species was more intelligent. On the other hand, if a significant difference was observed (be it through natural evolution, external forces such as dietary deficiencies, etc), they might not have been any more intelligent.
I remember seeing a few studies on this back when I took Physical Anthropology, but I can't recall offhand any of the authors. The basic conclusion amongst the physical anthropology crowd is that brain size does loosely predict intelligence, if you hold the internal structure to be constant. To get a *true* picture of the difference, though, you need to know the differences internally as well, as these are considered to be more strongly correlated.
Re:Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, the article is total nonsense.
If you compare across species, there is some correlation between brain size and intelligence, but not much. For instance, a whale's brain is a lot bigger than a human's, but there's no evidence that whales are all that much smarter than humans. Hamsters' brains are a lot smaller than horses', but they aren't dramatically dumber. The correlation gets somewhat stronger if you rate each species in terms of the ratio of brain size to body size. But in any case, the correlation is fairly weak, and is only a cross-species correlation. If you compare humans, there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence. Women have smaller heads than men on the average, but they're not less intelligent. The scientific consensus is that Boskop is not a separate species from H. Sapiens. Even if it was, the cross-species correlation is extremely loose, so you can't infer anything about one specific species. By the way, neanderthals also had bigger brains than humans, but the evidence is that they weren't any more intelligent. For example, there are areas where neanderthals and humans lived side by side for thousands of years, using identical types of tools. If the neanderthals were that much smarter than the humans, you'd think they'd have had fancier tools. Later on, humans started using more sophisticated tools (e.g., fish hooks and needles carved from bone), but IIRC the big-brained neanderthals never did.
Human intelligence depends a lot on specific genes, such as FOXP2. These genes have dramatic effects on intellectual ability, e.g., verbal ability. Families with abnormal FOXP2 have problems with language, but their brains are normal in size, and you wouldn't be able to tell them from normal humans based on their skulls. When you splice FOXP2 into mice, the baby mice vocalize differently than normal mice. But again, you wouldn't be able to tell the mice were abnormal based on their skulls. FOXP2 has been sequenced from DNA from Neanderthal fossils at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the result is that neanderthals have the same FOXP2 as modern humans. Note that they had to use molecular biology to find this out, though; you can't detect it by any amount of staring at the fossilized skulls.
Re:Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ? (Score:5, Funny)
-Douglas Adams
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
A dolphin, the mammal with one of the largest brains out there, is NOT smarter then a human.
That's what Arthur Dent thought too.
Re:Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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My thoughts exactly. A dolphin, the mammal with one of the largest brains out there, is NOT smarter then a human.
Shows what you know!
From the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
and...
The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner', but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.
Re:Does a bigger brain really mean higher IQ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Intelligence is always useful.
Not if it costs something. For example, IIRC the human brain takes 20% of a human's energy budget. If these hominids had bigger brains, they needed more food to keep them fed. More intelligence, in return for requiring more food to survive, may not be a good tradeoff.
As always... Wikipedia provides some sanity (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskop_Man [wikipedia.org]
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.
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Even clearer than the WP article is the link it provides: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/lynch-granger-big-brain-boskops-2008.html
Re:As always... Wikipedia provides some sanity (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps most important:
It would seem John Hawks has thoroughly debunked the idea.
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Nine out of Ten professors give automatic F's to students who cite Wikipedia in their papers.
[Citation needed]
Had to do it. For large projects, most professors I've had were fine with citing Wikipedia, provided you did not cite it as a *primary* source. It is usually safe to cite as a tertiary source (the same way you'd cite an encyclopedia in any decent paper), or as a secondary source depending on the professor.
The Size of the Frontal Region is One Factor (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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You're right - size isn't everything (there are plenty of examples of less intelligent, larger brained animals).
Broca's and Wernicke's areas are parts of the brain for constructing and understanding language, respectively. This part of the brain is a unique part of the homo sapiens, and is why our brains our asymmetric (broca's and wernicke's is almost always on the left side of your brain). It is believed that the crucial genetic mutation that allowed for this asymmetry, also allowed for us to suffer fro
We know how things go in our Idiocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:We know how things go in our Idiocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The smarter people will invariably be the minority overridden by the less smart masses for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways.
Persecution complex much? Just about everything you just whined about is utter bullshit. The smart have always ruled. The smart generals have triumphed from the less gifted leaders, helped by the inventions of the smart engineers, enabled by the discoveries of the smart scientists. Don't let your historical shortsightedness and your obsession with modern day American conservatives or even your movie-watching make you think otherwise.
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Oh really? The census reports indicate some pretty disturbing trends. Educated people are having fewer, if any children, while less and uneducated people are increasing in numbers. This isn't fantasy. Things are changing. Numbers have always overruled superior tech and intelligence. When you speak of smart general versus less smart general, you are talking about equal factors competing against each other on the basis of quality. One smart soldier with a machine gun cannot beat 1000 stick wielding pri
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If that's the case, then Darwinism is wrong.
Darwin claimed the notion of survival of the fittest in evolution. He never claimed that more intelligence lead to being more fit. Now, the fact that homo sapiens have intelligence has proven to be very beneficial in our survival but if increased intelligence lead to a deficiency in physical ability then the "less intelligent" homo sapiens might have been just smart enough and more physically able to supplant those big brained people.
But this all hinges on a tenuous thread of these creatures being smarter
Not everything is used for abstract thought (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
What the FUCK (Score:2)
That is wrong on so many different levels.
This is really old news (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Nerds vs. Jocks (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Brain size and birth (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
theory of evolution.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Selection bias and old news (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Size doesn't matter... when it comes to brains. (Score:2, Interesting)
Linked article (Score:2)
Oh my goodness, what a surprise... The linked article on SA was one for a question that I had submitted 10 years ago to "Ask the Experts"!!
Typical Evolutionary muddle (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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And today's evolutionary advantage is tomorrow's evolutionary disadvantage. As another poster said, bigger brains need bigger skulls which increases the odds that the mother will die during childbirth. And if the entire body is bigger, you need more food to feed said bigger body. So a hypothetical super-intelligent cousin of Homo Sapiens* could have evolved and still have gone extinct. Perhaps we're the Goldilocks of Hominids. Some were too dumb, some were too smart, we're just right.... for now (cue m
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Those big brains would not have evolved without an evolutionary advantage of some sort...
You're right, what you posted is "typical evolutionary muddle". It's a common misconception that traits evolve because they pose some sort of advantage. In fact, all traits, both advantageous and disadvantageous, evolve at random. Traits don't necessarily persist because they're advantageous, either. They do often disappear when a species is placed under stress if they are maladaptive, but only if they aren't paired with some other more adaptive trait (often completely randomly), and this is only if the
Sleestack (Score:3)
It was probably just a Sleestack. They failed because they only used logic and couldn't talk plain.
Misunderstanding evolution (Score:2)
Evolution says the species that adapt to change easier than others will survive. Sometimes it is being bigger or being smarter that gives a species an advantage over another. But not necessarily one or the other. A larger brain may mean that a species has the potential to be smarter but it comes with a cost. A larger brain also means more energy requirements. It also may mean a longer time to develop (longer childhood).
If the environment changes and food becomes scarce, a larger brain might be a disad
And yet, I can not help but think about ... (Score:2)
Bang Theory (Score:3, Funny)
The explanation is on a bumper sticker (Score:3, Funny)
"My kid beat up your honors student"
dave (who was usually on the receiving side of such efforts...)
More to Survival than Simple IQ (Score:3, Informative)
The other part of the picture, is fairly clear, and that is survival. As much as we seem to know of the "Boskops" they may have been an offshoot of the population of the time (but within the the larger envelope of homo sapien sapien). These larger skulled individuals, regardless if they were a population to themselves, faded. One of the points mentioned regarding brain size, is that they are "expensive" in the sense of the food and nutritional requirements. In considering their situation at that point in geologic time, they may have simply been a Formula 1 car showing up at the Baha 1000. Intelligence, like horsepower is but one aspect of survival (or winning) and whether their larger brain simply required too much "fuel" to finish, or that they were simply too specialized to be reflected in modern man, is open to speculation.
At some point in time we may collect enough comparative (fossil) evidence to look at DNA comparisons, between the "Boskops" and their contemporaries and then compare this to "modern" man and be able to fit these individuals into the larger evolutionary picture.
Wait a minute! (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not extinct!
I was just resting!
This is not science; stop publishing this crap (Score:3, Interesting)
Their work here has already been discredited in academic circles. Stop misinforming the public by giving it traction in the popular press. Had these neuroscientists had the sense to review their hypotheses with current scientists in anthropology and evolutionary biology they would have saved themselves a great deal of embarrassment.
There is no science occurring here. There is no new discovery here. This is simply two scientists in a completely unrelated field (neuroscience), looking at very old, discredited data, and pulling a headline grabbing book and promotional magazine article out of their asses. However well meaning they were, they failed to do their footwork here, and the result is embarrassing. I guess we should ask snopes to start writing an article on this now before this nonsense spreads.
Stupid people have more kids... (Score:3, Insightful)
From what I have seen, and I have lived in several states, the less educated and clever folks are, the more kids they tend to produce.
Conversely, the majority of my well educated and intelligent friends tend to have 1 child at most.
It would seem that a less advanced race of morons (i.e. Humans) could very quickly run these Uber-smarties to extinction just by our numbers alone.
Egyptians and the Great Sphinx (Score:3, Interesting)
If dating the water erosion on the Sphinx holds any water, then it would date back to 10,000 B.C. when that area was grasslands and experience significant water fall. If the Sphinx was built back then, it would align with the era of the last of the "Boskop Man" placing them in the area of the Nile.
Incidentally, the Egyptian pharaohs were usually depicted having large skulls, and married siblings (to preserve the bloodlines?). Maybe there's some correlation between the knowledge to build the Pyramids and these Boskop Men.
Re:IQ is a relative scale, not an objective one (Score:5, Insightful)
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While you are correct that it's a relative scale, they are comparing it to the current population (i.e. 100% homo sapiens sapiens) to arrive at the above average IQ figure. It may be disingenuous since we know so little about the rest of their physiology, but it's a fair guess that compared to us they were a lot smarter (since intelligence is almost entirely derived from the upper region of the brain)
What I want to know is, can we clone them (vis-a-vis the de-extinction process discussed a few days ago) an
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Do we? Do we really? Not that this is the forum for such discussion, but I defy you to demonstrate that our world today truly values intelligence any more than it does luck, perseverance, or aggression. Sure there are some areas where more intelligence would be a great benefit, but I would argue that most of the world competes in struggle that has little to do with basic intelligence.
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Yo momma's so smart...
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Actually, if his IQ was 149 there are a lot of slashdotters (including me) with brains as large or larger. Sometimes some of these guys here make me feel like an utter moron. In meatspace, with few exceptions only women do that to me.