by Richard

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that humans, homo sapiens, were not alone on this planet and, oddly enough, it’s true. Over the past million years, we’ve shared the planet with any number of near humans, called hominids. You probably know about some, such as Neanderthals. They’re pretty popular and we see them as pretty dumb.

What you might now know about, though, is a hominid species called the Boskop, for the town in South Africa where the first bones were found in 1912. See, the thing about this hominid is that it was smarter than humans. Much, much smarter.

The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. 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.

In addition to the huge melon, it turns out the Boskop people had another distinguishing feature: They had faces significantly smaller than humans. Basically, it would be like if you took a little dude’s face and plastered it on a big dude’s head.

Hmmm. Why does that sound so very familiar? Small bodies, large heads, small faces. Hmmm.

The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies. The naturalist Loren Eiseley made exactly this point in a lyrical and chilling passage from his popular book, The Immense Journey, describing a Boskop fossil:

“There’s just one thing we haven’t quite dared to mention. It’s this, and you won’t believe it. It’s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”

Yes, the Grays, little space aliens blamed for every surprise hemorrhoid in the rural south. Probing and all that, don’tcha know? Looks like we were visited by those little alien dudes, only they were natives of Earth and they went extinct thousands of years ago.

It’s a common misconception that evolution says we descended from apes. That’s not true. What it says is that both apes and men had, some time in the distant past, a common ancestor. Yet we humans keep seeing evolution as a process that consistently builds species better and better as they move forward toward the present, resulting in the pinacle of evolution: us. Humans.

Boskops argue otherwise. They say that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves.

There we go. Our alien overlords weren’t so very much alien, yeah? And, yet, they were. This kind of thing is why I love science.

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