Notes on Chapter 12: Giant Brains

Ideally, this chapter explains why the Boskop find was forgotten. In the first couple of sections, the authors talk about how the find was viewed by prominent scientists and how there were multiple finds that corroborated each other.

The section, "How Giant Brains were Forgotten," goes into the Piltdown fraud.  The authors argue that the fraud tainted subsequent finds by British paleontologists and that the Boskop discovery fell victim to this.  A secondary reason for the find being forgotten is the "irresistible fallacy" that human beings are the apex of evolution, that evolution leads inexorably towards intelligence and that therefore no prehistori

Preview

c species could have been more intelligent than humans.

The authors spend the rest of the chapter speculating about how Boskops could have been more intelligent and the nature of intelligence itself.

According to the authors, their intention was not to try and cast the Boskop find as an indication of a separate race.  To quote the above link:  It is not possible to read Big Brain and conclude that the authors believe in any way in this notional “Boskop race”, nor that we have in any way somehow mistakenly adopted decades-old, long-rejected interpretations of these skulls.

The problem I had with this was that I did get the impression  that the authors were trying to argue in favor of the notion that the South African find was indicative of a "Boskop Race."  Whether my impression is unique or not is something that you will have to figure out by reading the book on your own.