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Comment by brymaster | Hacker News Reader

This article is ancient (pun intended) in terms of paleoanthropology research and apparently comes with some criticism from people in the field:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskop_Man#Criticisms

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/return-amazi...

Recommend this story and discussion instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6849223

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I'm no anthropologist, but it all sounds like a big succession of unfounded claims following from a single fact (the large skull). Brain size is weakly correlated with IQ, structure is far more important: otherwise, people with size abnormalities should have been geniuses [1] There are mammalians with huge brains out there --- whales and elephants, and they're behind apes cognitively.

Modern processors are laid out in a few square centimeters, and not because we are involuntarily constrained by size, quite the opposite -- we're voluntarily constraining them. Making them bigger is actually inefficient: signals couldn't reach the whole die in a single clock cycle, losses increase, and so on. Many diminishing returns architectural changes are required for scaling up [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people -- most of those are sports players, not mathematicians or whatever

[2] http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7003/IntelDieSize_575px.png -- die size remains fairly constant through generations

It's not the size of the brain, it's the "brain-to-body mass ratio" that matters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio

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