Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions. The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. (Credit: Courtesy the American Museum of Natural History) ” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.Ī sketched reconstruction if the Boskop skull done in 1918. “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. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. FitzSimons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa.
These Afrikaner farmers, to their lasting credit, had the presence of mind to notice that there was something distinctly odd about the bones. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa. In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch.
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