Boskop Man is a type of hominid based on a skull discovered in 1913 in South Africa whose existence and interpretation is controversial. Originally, the skull was claimed to be 30 percent larger than that of modern humans and they were taken to have lived in southern Africa between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago. Their purported existence plays a prominent role in a book by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger.
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The first Boskop skull was discovered in 1913 by two Afrikaner farmers digging a drainage ditch. They offered it to Frederick William FitzSimons for examination; many related skulls were subsequently discovered by other prominent paleontologists of the time, including Robert Broom, Alexander Galloway, William Pycraft, Sidney Haughton, Raymond Dart, and others.
However, the term "Boskop Man" is no longer used by anthropologists,[1] and their supposedly unusual characteristics are considered to be a misinterpretation.[1][2]
Boskop Man was not a species, but a variation of anatomically modern humans;[1] there are well-studied skulls from Boskop, South Africa, as well as from Skuhl, Qazeh, Fish Hoek, Border Cave, Brno, Tuinplaas, and other locations,[3] which are near the high end of human skull sizes.
The original skull was incomplete consisting of frontal and parietal bones, with a partial occiput, one temporal and a fragment of mandible. John Hawks notes that "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."[1]
In April 2008, neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger published a book on human intelligence titled Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence, in which Boskop fossils play a prominent role. The authors suggest that the Boskops possessed a large forebrain, which may indicate a relatively high IQ.
Major questions have been raised about the quality and interpretation of the finds.
A paper read to the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in 1956 and later published in the journal Man observed that:
"...an isolated cranial fragment found 40 years ago near the surface in a dubious geological horizon, unassociated with implements and fauna, ... there has been developed conjecture after conjecture, speculation on speculation ... the features exhibited by the Boskop skull and those which have been termed 'Boskopoid' are not specific to any 'new' single, African racial group, and in Africa they may be found in varying degrees in the Bushmen, Hottentots or Bush-Hotttentot admixtures."[4]
Discover magazine gave Lynch and Granger' book a "fairly positive review"[2] and reprinted an excerpt. John Hawks says "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."[2] 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 "The web page has been changed to make that context clear".[2]