Boskop Man

The Boskop Man is an anatomically modern human fossil of the Middle Stone Age (Late Pleistocene) discovered in 1913 in South Africa. The fossil was at first described as ''Homo capensis'' and considered a separate human species by Broom (1918), but by the 1970s this "Boskopoid" type was widely recognized as representative of the modern Khoisan populations.

Discovery

Most theories regarding a "Boskopoid" type were based on the eponymous Boskop cranium, which was found in 1913 by two Afrikaner farmers. They offered it to Frederick William FitzSimons for examination and further research. Many similar skulls were subsequently discovered by paleontologists such as Robert Broom, William Pycraft and Raymond Dart.

The original skull was incomplete consisting of frontal and parietal bones, with a partial occiput, one temporal and a fragment of mandible.

Fossils of similar type are known from Tsitsikamma (1921), Matjes River (1934), Fish Hoek and Springbok Flats,
Skhul, Qafzeh, Border Cave, Brno, Tuinplaas, and other locations.

Cranial capacity

The Boskop Man fossils are notable for their unusually large cranial capacities, with reported cranial-capacity ranges between 1,700 and 2,000 cm³."The skull is a large one, with an estimated endocranial volume of 1800 ml. But it is hardly complete, and arguments about its overall size -- exacerbated by its thickness, which confuses estimates based on regression from external measurements -- have ranged from 1700 to 2000 ml. It is large, but well within the range of sizes found in recent males.
The "amazing" Boskops
"The portrayal of 'Boskops' in the Discover excerpt is so out of line with anthropology of the last forty years, that I am amazed the magazine printed it. I am unaware of any credible biological anthropologist or archaeologist who would confirm their description of the 'Boskopoids,' except as an obsolete category from the history of anthropology." He does note that the web editor at ''Discover'' replied that "the excerpt was intended to run identified as a 'controversial idea, but that context didn't come across as intended., and that " e web page has been changed to make that context clear". It has been concluded that whenever archaeologists uncovered Hottentot skulls that possessed an especially large cranial capacity, they likely labeled them as Boskopoid skulls and as such, the Boskopoid skull type was simply an artifact of their biases. For instance, when James Henderson Sutherland Gear identified skulls recovered from Tsitsikamma as Boskopoid, he simply compared them with the original Boskop Man skull without comparing them with any modern African skulls and as a result, failed to realize they were Hottentot skulls.

In the book ''Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence'' (2008) by neurologists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, it was claimed the large brain size in Boskop individuals might be indicative of particularly high general intelligence. Anthropologist John Hawks harshly criticized the depiction of the Boskop fossils in the book and in the book's review article in ''Discover'' magazine.

Fraudulent photograph

An image has circulated across the Internet which is purported to be of a Boskopoid skull. However, this image in actuality depicts the skull of a person with hydrocephalus.A Study of the Relations of the Brain to the Size of the Head ''Biometrika'' Volume 4

See also

* Wajak Man

References

Further reading

*
* Tobias, P.V. (1959) "The history and metamorphosis of the Boskop concept" in: Galloway (ed.), ''The Skeletal Remains of Bambandyanalo'', 137–146.
* {{cite journal , doi = 10.1002/ajpa.1330280503 , last1 = Tobias , first1 = P , year = 1985 , title = History of Physical Anthropology in Southern Africa , journal = Yearbook of Physical Anthropology , volume = 28 , pages = 1–52 (p. 14), doi-access = free

Peopling of Africa
Homo sapiens fossils
Fossils of South Africa
1913 in paleontology
Archaeological controversies