Boscopes: Smarter Than Modern People

Irina Shlionskaya

From time to time, in different parts of the globe, the remains of creatures similar to people, but still having some "non-standard" signs, are found. These include the remains of boskop - ancient human skeletons with huge skulls. They are named so because they were found in the vicinity of the South African settlement of Boskop. It happened more than a century ago, and scientific discussions about the findings continue to this day.

In 1913, the remains of humanoid creatures that lived about 30,000 years before our era, that is, just at the dawn of the appearance of Homo sapiens, fell into the hands of Frederick Fitzsimmons, director of the museum in Port Elizabeth (the territory of present-day South Africa).

According to Fitzsimmons, these could not have been the distant ancestors of mankind: their brain volume reached 1900 cubic centimetres, which is a third more than that of modern people. For this reason, the director of the museum confidently stated that these are Cro-Magnons, who are considered the forerunners of mankind, but at the same time belong to one of the extinct branches. Many scientists believed that this was a person: the structure of the skeleton of boscopes indicated that during their lifetime they were upright. And the device of their jaws - that they were able to speak.

For some time, boscopes were practically forgotten, but last year a book was published by famous American neurophysiologists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger: "The Big Brain: The Origin and Future of Human Intelligence." In this work, a lot of attention is paid specifically to the Boscope population. 

"They must have been as intelligent as the Cro-Magnons, as we are now as intelligent as the monkeys," write Lynch and Granger. The researchers refer to the fact that the frontal lobes of the brain, which are responsible precisely for the level of intelligence, were very strongly developed in boscopes - they were one and a half times larger than the corresponding parts of our brain. This means, the authors of the book summarise, boscopes were able to process various information flows in parallel, analyse complex situations, catch unobvious connections between various things and events ... Most likely, their memory was much better than ours, for example, they could remember themselves from a very early age.

But in this case, why did the "brilliant" boscopes die out, unlike us, such ordinary ones? Lynch and Granger hypothesised that their brains lacked the energy that the meagre diet available to ancient people could not provide. Or maybe they had nowhere to apply their potential: the culture had not yet been formed, they lacked knowledge about the world around them. After all, among us, modern people, geniuses often turn out to be not too adapted to real life.

“Perhaps, nature tested one of the variants of brain evolution on boscopes,” says Sergey Savelyev, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Head of the Embryology Department of the Research Institute of Human Morphology of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. “However, this attempt was doomed to failure in advance. Too much energy is required to maintain such a brain, and it gives too little advantage."

Lynch and Granger suggest that if boscopes had not disappeared from the face of the Earth, then you and I would have had no chance of survival at all. It would take them no more than 10,000 years to create a "super-civilisation". And by now, they would probably already have achieved relative immortality and would have learned to control space and time.

- Pravda.ru