{"id":108947,"date":"2009-12-28T14:45:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-28T19:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/discovermagazine.com\/2009\/the-brain-2\/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us"},"modified":"2009-12-28T14:45:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-28T19:45:00","slug":"what-happened-to-the-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/108947","title":{"rendered":"What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Huge-headed humans called Boskops lived in Africa with Homo sapiens until just 10,000 years ago. What happened to them? Shouldn&#8217;t their superior intellect have given them a survival advantage? We internally activate many thoughts at once, but we can retrieve only one at a time. Could the Boskop brain have achieved the ability to retrieve one memory while effortlessly processing others in the background, a split-screen effect enabling far more power of attention?<\/p>\n<p>Each of us balances the world that is actually out there against our mind\u2019s own internally constructed version of it. Maintaining this balance is one of life\u2019s daily challenges. We occasionally act on our imagined view of the world, sometimes thoroughly startling those around us. (\u201cWhy are you yelling at me? I wasn\u2019t angry with you\u2014you only thought I was.\u201d) Our big brains give us such powers of extrapolation that we may extrapolate straight out of reality, into worlds that are possible but that never actually happened. Boskop\u2019s greater brains and extended internal representations may have made it easier for them to accurately predict and interpret the world, to match their internal representations with real external events.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps, though, it also made the Boskops excessively internal and self-reflective. With their perhaps astonishing insights, they may have become a species of dreamers with an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/DiscoverMag\/~4\/AX80CG8_-Pc\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Huge-headed humans called Boskops lived in Africa with Homo sapiens until just 10,000 years ago. What happened to them? Shouldn&#8217;t their superior intellect have given them a survival advantage? We internally activate many thoughts at once, but we can retrieve only one at a time. Could the Boskop brain have achieved the ability to retrieve [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}