| The Boskops are back. They are retooled, redesigned, | | | | was the logical end of complete foetalization: a |
| and reselected. Are they ready this time for | | | | desperate struggle to survive among a welter of more |
| domination of the species? They have found their way | | | | prolific and aggressive stocks. |
| back from the lost world of the South African plains | | | | Our brains do not have the cranial capacity of Boskop |
| they inhabited more than 10,000 years ago. | | | | man. Their skulls may have been too large for |
| Dismissed as an anomaly soon after their skull | | | | successful birthing. The very large eyes may have |
| fragments were unearthed by a couple of farmers | | | | been replaced by more efficient sensory synapses |
| digging a drainage ditch in 1913, the scientific community | | | | and cortical responses. We hate to think of ourselves |
| has pretty much forgotten about the Boskops until | | | | as less endowed than the Boskops. Some are |
| recently. The recent launch of the paperback edition of | | | | arrogant enough to suggest that they themselves, as |
| Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence | | | | individuals, are more gifted than the Boskops. We |
| has added new life and new discussion to Boskop | | | | cannot easily recognize them. Gone are the large |
| man. The authors, Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, | | | | skulls, the childlike faces, and the huge eyes. We can |
| have a great deal of knowledge and expertise in | | | | only know them by their attitudes and their actions. |
| neuroscience. According to the authors and other | | | | Washington D.C. has a number of redesigned Boskops |
| scientists the Boskop forebrains were 30-50% larger | | | | in positions of real power. They are making decisions |
| than ours! The few skull fragments found indicated a | | | | for us in their dark rooms. They are clothed in secrecy |
| humanoid with a face more childlike (pedomorphic) in | | | | and veiled in lies. They are affecting the lives of our |
| appearance than us. He had very large eyes and a | | | | future generations. What happened to the promises of |
| small mouth. The large head, large eyes, and small | | | | transparency? Their cerebral superiority must be |
| mouth, combined with a brain 30% more capable than | | | | blinded by the naive thoughts of a new planet, or a |
| our own, gave them an alien or superhuman look. | | | | New World Order. |
| Loren Eiseley in The Immense Journey attributed super | | | | Come back, Jake Sully. Come back, Grace! There will |
| cerebral qualities to Boskop man and called him Future | | | | be no duck-billed rhinos to save us when we are |
| Man. He frets that we are:forgetting the high artistic | | | | under attack. There will be no dragon-headed, winged |
| sensitivity which flowered in the closing Ice Age of | | | | Velociraptors to lift us away from our problems. There |
| Europe and which, oddly, blossomed here as well, | | | | is no Pandora. Maybe you are the one who is looking |
| lingering on even among the dwarfed Bushmen of the | | | | for the unobtanium. |
| Kalahari. | | | | I fear, as does Loren Eiseley in his Immense Journey, |
| What we can say is that perhaps the unloosed | | | | that the re-emergence of Boskop man will mark the |
| mechanism ran too fast, that the biological clock had | | | | end of the drama and foretell the extinction of a race. |
| sped them out of their time and place - a time which | | | | I pray that it does not. |
| ten thousand years later has still not arrived. This, then, | | | | |