User:Ex ottoyuhr/Boskop Man

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Boskop Man was once thought to be a unique and ancient hominid genus. The possible genus was based on a skull discovered in 1913. The skull of this hominid was 30 percent larger than the modern human skull. They lived in southern Africa probably between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago. The term "Boskop Man" is no longer used by anthropologists, and their supposedly unusual characteristics are considered to be a misinterpretation (see, for example The "amazing" Boskops).

Boskop Man was not a species, but a variation of anatomically modern humans; there are well-studied skulls from Boskop, South Africa, as well as from Skuhl, Qazeh, Fish Hoek, Border Cave, Brno, Tuinplass, and other locations, which are near the high end of human skull sizes, especially frontal lobe capacity; the frontal lobe is |significant for human fluid intelligence.

Anthropologists generally accept that brain sizes have been falling over the past few tens of thousands of years, as these skulls dramatically illustrate.

The first Boskop skull was discovered in 1913 by Frederick William FitzSimons; many related subsequent skulls were discovered by other prominent paleontologists of the time, including Robert Broom, Alexander Galloway, William Pycraft, Sidney Haughton, Raymond Dart, and others.

The American anthropologist, educator, and natural science writer Loren Eiseley described them in his book "The Immense Journey" (1958): ... 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. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face. When the skull is studied in projection and ratios computed, we find that these fossil South African folk, generally called “Boskop” or “Boskopoids” after the site of first discovery, have the amazing cranium-to-face ratio of almost five to one. In Europeans it is about three to one. This figure is a marked indication of the degree to which face size had been “modernized” and subordinated to brain growth.