BOSKOP
Lo CATION
Open-air site of Koloniesplaats, on the E. bank of the
Mooi River, 7 miles N of Potchefstroom, SW Trans-
vaal, South Africa.
D I s COVERY
October 1913, by workers digging agricultural
trench.Various bones were passed to J. L. Groenewald,
who gave the hominid remains to F. W. FitzSimons,
Director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, shortly after
their discovery. This was the first fossilized hominid
found in South Africa.
MATERIAL
Calotte, plus temporal and mandibular fragments as
well as some postcranial bones, not all necessarily
from the same individual (PEM 1411).DATING AND STRATIGRAPHIC CONTEXT
Found at a shallow depth in disturbed brecciated river
sediments, mostly cemented ironstone pebbles
(Haughton, 1917). Other mammal bones came from
the same deposits; all seem to have been secondarily
redeposited by river action. Generally considered to be
Late Pleistocene, an age apparently supported by ele-
mental analyses (Oakley et al., 1977). Fossiliferous de-
posit was very limited; subsequent excavations yielded
nothing of interest.ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXT
Middle Stone Age, on the basis of a single artifact
reported from the site by van Riet Lowe (1954).PREVIOUS DESCFUPTIONS AND ANALYSES
First formally described by F. W. FitzSimons (1915),
who found it to be “of a race as ancient, or more so,
than the Neanderthal” (FitzSimons, 1915: 615).
FitzSimons accordingly assigned the specimen to the
“Neanderthal race” (if “more intelligent” than the
Neanderthal holotype); but in the same issue of
Nature, Arthur Keith (1915) strongly disagreed with
the claimed Neanderthal affinities, while accepting the
ancientness of the fossil. Haughton (1917) also re-
jected the Neanderthal assignment, finding stronger
resemblances to the “Cro-Magnon and Bantu types.”
In 1918, Robert Broom re-evaluated the Boskop skull
and emphasized its resemblances to those of modern
humans. However, on the basis of mandibular features
he (characteristically) made it the type of a new
species, Homo capensis. Shortly afterward, the same au-
thor claimed that the Boskop skull represented the “di-
rect but remote ancestors of the Bushmen of today”
(Broom, 1923). In 1925, Pycraft (who estimated a cra-
nial volume of ca. 1700 ml) drew attention to features
of the area of the jaw joint that he believed to be par-
ticularly “Bushmanlike.” After a lapse of some years,
the specimen was revisited by Galloway (1937, also
1959), who concluded that it represented a distinct,
large-headed “Boskop physical type” of Middle Stone
Age (MSA) modern human (of which, in 1959, he40