They walked like people, were of the same height and build. But huge heads and baby faces set them apart from the ancient inhabitants of South Africa
They did not come from another planet, did not return from the distant future. They lived several tens of thousands of years ago, and then suddenly disappeared. The brain volume of these mysterious creatures, which scientists called boscopes, exceeded the size of our brain by a third. An incredibly interesting subject to research? Yes. But already half a century, as boscopes disappeared from the field of view of science - back in 1958, anthropologists decided that there was nothing unusual in the fossil remains of these hominids.
A few weeks ago, the boscopes suddenly "resurrected": Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, renowned American neurophysiologists, published the book "The Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence." The authors suggested that boscopes, due to the volume of the brain, had such capabilities that even now are inaccessible to humans. Anthropologists took the book with hostility, because its authors are even ignorant of anthropology. "It all sounds like the myth of the Atlanteans," wrote John Hawkes, professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in his blog. The dispute about boscopes, which flared up with renewed vigor many years later, at first seems like a banal skirmish between professionals and amateurs who have infringed upon the sacred. In fact, we are talking about scientists trying to understand the evolution of the brain and maybe solve an old question:does the size of the skull affect the functionality of its contents? In other words, is it possible to draw parallels between volume and intelligence?
The fact that boscopes existed became known to the scientific community in the fall of 1913, when several fragments of old bones were brought to the director of the museum in Port Elizabeth (present-day South Africa) Frederick Fitzsimons. After going to the site of the find in the vicinity of the city of Boskop Fitzsimons decided that these were pieces of a skull, and a disproportionately large one. The skull belonged to a man who lived in Africa from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago and, with a height of 170 cm, had a brain volume of 1800-1900 cm3 - this is 30% more than the average brain volume of a modern person. In 1915, Fitzsimons published a report in the journal Nature about the find.
It is believed that by the time the boscopes appeared, human evolution had long been completed and modern Homosapiens ruled on Earth. However, the paleontologist Robert Broome, who was then working in Cape Town, proposed to single out large-headed people in a special group - Homo capensis (literally: "man from the cape", from the name of the Eastern Cape, where Boskop is located). The combinations "boscopic man", "boscopoid", "boskop" began to be used as a trivial name. Subsequently, other remains were found, which were attributed to the same group.
The famous anthropologist Raymond Dart, who discovered Australopithecus, lamented in 1923 that the scientific community, distracted by the controversy over the Pildown man (the remains of a man with ape-like features found in Great Britain, which later turned out to be fake) and the First World War, did not pay due attention to boscopes. Dart detailed the findings and proved that the large brain of the boscope was not the result of hydrocephalus. For these people, a big head was not a disease, but the norm. Despite his efforts, the boscopes were forgotten again.
The next time they were remembered in 1958, and twice. Essayist Lauren Eisley wrote an enthusiastic essay about the boscopes "The Man of the Future," and anthropologist Ronald Singer recklessly attempted to "bury them." In his article, Singer showed that there is no reason to single out the boscopes as a separate group, as Broome did, and even more so to call them the "boscopic race". According to Singer, the selection of skulls in the "boscopic" group was carried out without applying the necessary criteria: every large old skull got there.
After Singer's article, the boscopes remained in almost complete oblivion for another 50 years, until the book of Lynch and Granger came out. “I first encountered boscopes over 40 years ago,” says Lynch. "A passage from Aisley's book just fascinated me." Isley ended up in the list of references for the book by Lynch and Granger, but Singer did not receive such an honor, although his article is closely related to the cited works of Broome and Dart.
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The intrusion of brain scientists into a foreign field has outraged many anthropologists. Nothing irritates anthropologists more than the isolation of new species and the destruction of the harmonious picture of the universe that has developed in them. Ten years ago, when the first finds were made in the Georgian town of Dmanisi, Georgian anthropologists immediately decided that they had discovered a new species of man who lived about 1.8 million years ago. And they called him a Georgian man (Homo georgicus) - this immediately caused laughter in the entire scientific community. Now anthropologists are criticizing Lynch and Granger. Well-known expert Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley believes that it is impossible to talk about any boscopic view. And John Hawkes, who criticized neurophysiologists in his blog, although he admitted that he had not read the book yet, he said,that already the editorial annotation causes him strong dissatisfaction.
Hawks emphasizes that all hypotheses about the "Boscopic race" were completely dispelled by Ronald Singer. The find in the vicinity of Boskop, in his opinion, is just a large skull of representatives of the modern Khoisan race, uniting the Bushmen and Hottentots living in South Africa: “These people did not disappear anywhere - they are still with us!” “Hawkes’s remarks look pretty ridiculous,” Lynch takes offense. “Our book doesn't even mention the Boscopic race,” confirms Granger. “And we are not at all postulating that boscopes belong to a new species. The focus of the book is not only on the boscopic skulls, but also on many other large skulls that are around 10,000 years old. Boscopes are one of the largest, so we naturally paid a lot of attention to them. Our thoughts, of course, are bold, but for a theoretical analysis - the very thing."
Thoughts are really bold: if we are much smarter than a Homo erectus, whose brain is 350 cm3 smaller than ours, then, according to scientists, it is logical to assume that boscopes, whose brain is 400 cm3 larger than ours, were by the same amount smarter us. “There is a growing body of brain imaging work that claims that there is some correlation between brain volume and IQ,” says Gary Lynch. The authors cautiously suggest that boscopes should have an IQ of 149 on average (the average person is thought to have 100).
However, the director of the Research Institute and the Museum of Anthropology at Moscow State University, Alexandra Buzhilova, argues that one cannot talk about intelligence in terms of the volume, mass, or size of the brain. “Remember the textbook examples: Anatole France and Ivan Turgenev,” she says. “The first had an obscenely small brain, the second was large and was inferior in mass, perhaps, only to Byron's. And at the same time, the intelligence of each of these people was undoubtedly high."
Lynch and Granger, in support of their position, say that the differences between the brains of boscopes and modern people were not limited to the total volume. The boscopes had very highly developed frontal lobes, their volume exceeded the volume of the lobes of a modern person by one and a half times. It is in these parts of the brain that a significant part of intellectual activity falls.
According to the authors' hypothesis, in primates, brain enlargement primarily affects the associative areas of the cortex, in which there are neural networks of a special type, the so-called random access networks. Using computer models of the behavior of such networks, Lynch and Granger were able to guess what were the differences in the thinking abilities of the boscope and modern humans.
First, boscopes had more information in one “thought”. Any mental image consists of many details: for example, how many people were present at the meeting, what sounds were heard somewhere in the background, what color was the wallpaper. Boscopes had a richer world of memories: where an ordinary person would remember only a picture, the boscope retained sounds and smells in his memory.
Secondly, thanks to a more developed neural network, boscopes had more opportunity for associations. They could see connections between events and facts that would be very difficult for an ordinary brain to reach. And this ability to find non-obvious connections is very important. "Let's remember how Newton connected the fall of an apple with gravity," Lynch gives an example. Third, boscopes were better able to process multiple streams of information in parallel. “The extended networks allowed them to have a conversation while consciously reflecting on another task,” Lynch suggests. The boscopes were better at analyzing complex situations with a large number of possible outcomes. They kept their old memories intact for much longer: if necessary, the boscope could mentally restore itself at an earlier age - this skill is almost inaccessible to a person.“Interesting assumptions. Indeed, it is very important to understand what abilities a large brain can give,”says William Kelvin, a neurophysiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
It is not entirely clear why these mysterious people, who, according to the authors of the book, could already potentially write poetry and compose music, having lived only about 20,000 years, disappeared from the face of the Earth (if more correctly, why their descendants cannot boast of such a large brain) … Maybe the huge brain required an amount of energy that their diet could not provide. Maybe giving birth to a baby with such a giant skull was too difficult. Perhaps they appeared too early, when a perfect brain did not yet represent an evolutionary benefit: there was not enough "external bearer of knowledge", a culture that would allow to fully use its potential. Anthropologists who have studied the remains of the boscopes have long come to the conclusion that despite the large head, these hominids had small, one might say, childish faces. This phenomenon - the persistence of childhood traits into adulthood - is sometimes accompanied by rapid evolutionary changes.
“It is quite possible that nature has tested one of the variants of brain evolution on boscopes,” says Sergei Savelyev, doctor of biological sciences, head of the department of embryology at the Research Institute of Human Morphology of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. “However, this attempt was doomed to failure in advance. It costs too much energy to maintain such a brain, and it provides too few benefits. Even now, the brain that we have is enough for us to solve current problems."
The authors of the book themselves, as if mocking their anthropological colleagues, give their version of the extinction of large-headed hominids: perhaps the boscopes disappeared precisely due to their increased analytical abilities. Having considered many more options for their development than a modern man could, they simply came to the conclusion that nothing good awaited them, and stopped fighting for survival.