Boskop Man was once thought to be a unique and ancient hominid genus. The term "Boskop Man" is no longer used by anthropologists, and their supposedly unusual characteristics are considered to be a misinterpretation.
Both Lynch and Granger are experts in neuroscience, with a long list of publications on memory, cortical organization, and chemical regulation of brain activity. Neither of them is an anthropologist or archaeologist. Simple research on "Boskop", and you will discover that this has not been a going topic in human evolution for nearly fifty years. Most intellectual effort on the topic of "Boskopoids" happened between 1915 and 1930.
The supposed "Boskop race" was named after a South African skull found on a Transvaal farm in 1913. 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 have ranged from 1700 to 2000 ml. It is large, but well within the range of sizes found in recent males.
This concept of a "Boskop race" did not emerge from any clear understanding of the South African past. What provoked the racial category was a confusion about the relationships of recent and historical southern African remains. Anthropologists had attempted to apply primary racial categories such as "Negroid," "Bushman," etc corresponding to extant or recent tribes or other groups. However the distinctions between these categories did not appear to extend far into the prehistoric past. So anthropologists looked for the origins of these racial types within the sample of prehistoric crania -- constructing a "Boskopoid" type for those with later "Bush" or "Strandloper" resemblances.
This category became untenable as further information about the archaeology of South Africa came to light. Ronald Singer (1958, Singer R. The Boskop "race" problem. Man 58:173-178.) reviewed the "Boskop race" evidence as it existed by the 1950's. He concluded that there was no reason to maintain that any "big-headed, small-faced group" had existed in prehistory, separate from the current biological variability of "Bushman, Hottentot and Negro." But that view is unsupportable. This selection was initially done almost without any regard for archaeological or cultural association. Later, when a more systematic inventory of archaeological associations was entered into evidence, it became clear that the "Boskop race" was entirely a figment of anthropologists' imaginations. Instead, the MSA-to-LSA population of South Africa had a varied array of features, within the last 20,000 years trending toward those present in historic southern African peoples. Singer ends his paper thusly:
"It is now obvious that what was justifiable speculation (because of paucity of data) in 1923, and was apparent as speculation in 1947, is inexcusable to maintain in 1958."
Why would two neuroscientists, after going to all the trouble to write a book about the evolution of the human brain, use completely obsolete anthropological information without doing a simple research to see if the facts have stayed the same as in 1923?
Please Slashdot, file this story under category "science fiction"!
