Discover magazine has a tantalizing entitled “What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us?” The story revolves around certain hominid fossils found in South Africa:
He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.
I use the word tantalizing for a reason, of course. An article from John Hawks throws a different light on the whole story:
So I’m left wondering: 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 Google search to see if the facts have stayed the same as in 1923?
I don’t have an answer, but I’m interested in reading the book to see if it lives up to its billing.
