Boskop Man


The Boskop Man is an anatomically modern human fossil of the Middle Stone Age discovered in 1913 in South Africa.
The fossil was at first described as Homo capensis and considered a separate human species by Broom,
but by the 1970s this "Boskopoid" type was widely recognized as representative of the modern Capoid 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, Matjes River, Fish Hoek and Springbok Flats,
Skhul, Qazeh, Border Cave, Brno, Tuinplaas, and other locations.

Cranial capacity

The Boskop Man fossils are notable for their unusually large cranial capacity.
Reported cranial capacity ranges between 1,700 and 2,000 cm3.
This was addressed in the book Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by neurologists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, who 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.