Long-heads of Sub-Saharan Africa

Maasai woman in traditional clothing and jewelry

Previous posts in this series:
Long-heads of Europe
Long-heads of Asia
Long-heads of America
Symbols of our gods
Long-heads of Egypt

Post outline

1. Canteen Kopje skull
2. Peers Cave skull
3. Boskop Man
4. Dolichocephalic heads of Africans today
5. Climate and head shape
6. Cranial volume and genetics
7. References

1. Canteen Kopje skull

Canteen Kopje Skull. Image credit: Smith et al.¹

The Canteen Kopje skull was found in 1925 at Canteen Kopje, outside Barkly West, Northern Cape, South Africa. It was studied and reconstructed by British-South African medical doctor and palaeontologist Robert Broom, who described it in Nature in 1929.² Although Broom’s reconstruction of the skull showed features that were similar to those of the archaic Boskop Man (discussed below) in terms of morphology and size, Smith et al. (2012)¹ dated the skull to the Holocene period [last 12,000 years].

2. Peers Cave skull

The Peers Cave skull. Image credit: Stynder et al.³

In the late 1920s, Victor Stanley Peers and his son Bertie discovered this skeleton of a human male in a rock shelter known as Skildergatkop Cave until 1941, since when it has been called Peers Cave. The cave is in the False Bay region of Cape Town, South Africa, overlooking the suburbs of Noordhoek and Fish Hoek.

The skull was previously estimated to be of the late Middle Stone Age [at least 25,000 years before present]. However, more recently, AMS radiocarbon dating at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU), UK, gave a calibrated age of 7266–7179 years BP at 68.2% probability and 7346–7145 years at 95.4% probability.³

3. Boskop Man

Drawing of Boskop Man from Robert Broom (1918).⁴

Boskop Man is an anatomically modern human fossil of the Middle Stone Age [the Middle Paleolithic, a period from 300,000 to 50,000 years ago], found at Boskop, Transvaal, South Africa, in 1913.⁵ The fossil was studied by British-South African medical doctor and palaeontologist Robert Broom⁴, who found that the Boskop Man had an extraordinarily large cranial capacity of 1,980 cc and was of a separate human species, Homo capensis.

Neurologists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger (2008)⁶ wrote the following about the Boskop skull:

1. It seems that the Boskop skull housed a brain at least 25 percent larger than our own.
2. Later discoveries of more Boskop skulls indicated that very large skulls were normal for this race.
3. In addition to the very large cranial capacity, the skulls were distinguished by their small, childlike faces (pedomorphosis).
4. Although Neanderthals and Homo erectus are widely known, Boskops are almost entirely forgotten. Facts of ancient ancestors like the Boskops, who seem to have been intellectually superior to us, run counter to cherished ideas about evolution and progress, and were therefore never destined to be popular.
5. Boskops show that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, lived in southern Africa until quite recently, until giving way to us — smaller-brained and possibly less advanced Homo sapiens.
6. The much larger brains of Boskops compared to us implies that their brain function was substantially different to ours:

• Brain size increase occurs mostly in the cortex (not in more ancient structures) and within the cortex the areas that grow by far the most are the association areas. Consequently, the prefrontal cortex of Boskops would have been an enormous 53 percent larger than ours.
• The prefrontal cortex is closely involved in our highest cognitive functions — making sense out of the complex stream of events flowing into the brain, placing mental contents into appropriate sequences and hierarchies, and planning future actions. In essence, the prefrontal cortex is at the heart of our most flexible and forward-looking thoughts. Boskops’ greater brains and extended internal representations may have made it easier for them to accurately predict and interpret the world.
• Even if brain size only accounts for 10 to 20 percent of an IQ test score, this implies that Boskops would have had an average IQ of 149 (genius level).

Concerning the demise of the Boskops, Lynch and Granger (2008) note that:

• Human history is characterized by oppression, savagery, and genocide.
• The preternaturally civilized Boskops likely had no chance against our barbarous ancestors.
• If they had survived, the Boskops could have been leaders of society today.
• Some genes persist in a population or mix themselves into surrounding populations via interbreeding, thus remaining on the periphery, neither becoming widely fixed in the population at large nor being entirely eliminated from the gene pool.

Further to the last point above, Boskop features are still occasionally seen in living populations of Bushmen (aka San peoples), and long-head people with large cranium capacities can also sometimes be seen among other populations of Africans. Earlier in the modern era, it seems that dolichocephaly was more typical of Bushmen. In Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1870) Scientific Memoirs III,⁷ Thomas Henry Huxley wrote:

“The Bushmen of the Cape area must be regarded as a special and peculiar modification of the Negroid type. They are remarkable for their low stature, the males rarely much exceeding four feet in height, while the females may fall considerably below that stature. Both sexes are remarkably well made. The skin is of a yellowish-brown colour, the eyes and hair black, and the latter woolly. They are all dolichocephalic; and the brim of the female pelvis has its anteroposterior diameter longer than the transverse, in a larger proportion of cases than in other forms of mankind.” (page 566)

4. Dolichocephalic heads of Africans today

San people

L San woman, R San boy

Two San men

Other Africans

Maasai women in traditional clothing and jewelry

Sudanese children as refugees in Uganda

5. Climate and head shape

Differences in human head shapes, such as a higher tendency toward dolichocephaly (long, narrow heads) are driven by evolutionary adaptations to climate, natural selection, and genetic variation over thousands of years.⁸ Concerning climate adaptation, Allen’s rule suggests that mammals in warmer climates often evolve longer, leaner body proportions — including narrower cranial and facial structures — to help maximize body surface area and dissipate heat efficiently.⁸

There is an inverse relationship between head length (cephalic index) and climate: longer heads (dolichocephalic) are predominant in hot climatic regions and broader heads (mesocephalic or brachycephalic) are predominant in less hot regions.⁹ Under cold stress, the most advantageous head shape is round (brachycephalic), as this most closely approximates the spherical ideal. Under hot climatic conditions, a long head would be more advantageous.¹⁰

There are notable exceptions to the climate – head shape relationship among modern humans. In particular, consistent with the works of early anthropologists, the long skull (dolichocephalic) has always been associated with the “Nordic race.” In fact a dolichocephalic skull was a defining factor in determining whether or not someone was of the Nordic race. The term “dolichocephalic blond” was often used to describe these northern peoples.¹¹

6. Cranial volume and genetics

The volume of a skull is genetically predetermined. Climate influences skull shape, not skull volume. Climate cannot explain the formation of the large-volume long skulls that have been found all over Earth, in both hot and cold climates.^12,13

7. References

1. Smith, P., Nshimirimana, R., de Beer, F., Morris, D. et al., (2012). Canteen Kopje: A new look at an old skull, South African Journal of Science 108(1-2), 1-9, Jan 2012.
2. Broom, R. (1929). Australoid elements in the Korannas, Nature, 124(3127), 507.
3. Stynder, B., Sealy, W., et al. (2009). A mid-Holocene AMS 14C date for the presumed Upper Pleistocene human skeleton from Peers Cave, South Africa, Journal of Human Evolution 56(4), 431-4.
4. Broom, R. (1918). The evidence afforded by the Boskop skull of a new species of primitive man (Homo capensis), Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 23(2), 63-79.
5. Schwartz, J. & Tattersall, I. (2003). The human fossil record, craniodental morphology of genus Homo (Africa and Asia), Wiley Online Books.
6. Lynch, G. & Granger, R. (2008). Big brain: the origins and future of human intelligence, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
7. Huxley, Thomas H. (1870). On the geographical distribution of the chief modifications of mankind, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1870) Scientific Memoirs III.
8. Bogin, Barry (2020). Growth variation in living human populations, Cambridge University Press online.
9. Beals, Kenneth L. (1972). Head form and climatic stress, Am. J. Phys. Anthropol., 37, 85-92.
10. Bharati, S., Som, S., Bharati, P., & Vasulu, T. S. (2001). Climate and head form in India, American Journal of Human Biology, 13(5), 626-634.
11. Heathen-Vegan (2018). The Neanderthal question, European or Jew? New American Government, 22 Jun 2018.
12. Holloway, April (2014). Unravelling the genetics of elongated skulls – Transcript of interview with Brien Foerster, Ancient Origins, updated 8 Feb 2014.
13. Foerster, Brien (2011). Elongated skulls of Paracas: A people and their world, Graham Hancock, 11 Aug 2011.

Family from afar