Boskop, noun

/ˈbɒskɒp//ˈbɔskɔp/
Origin:
Place name.
Usually attributive (passing into adjective), occasionally predicative: descriptive of the early type of human indicated by the late Pleistocene skull found at Boskop in the North West Province (in what was formerly the Transvaal) in 1913.
Note:
‘Boskop man’, originally described as Homo capensis, is now regarded as a species of Homo sapiens from which the Khoisan peoples are probably descended.
1915 Nature 5 Aug. 615The Boskop man was of the Neanderthal race, but more advanced in intelligence.
1930 C.G. Seligman Races of Afr. (1939) 48Whether the Boskop skull..represents an undifferentiated Boskop-Khoisan type, or..is itself a derivative with the Khoisan of a less differentiated proto-Boskop type, is uncertain.
1970 M. Wilson 1000 Yrs before Van Riebeeck 4Sometimes the short hunters described were the light-skinned people with tiny hands and feet, familiar in the south here as Bush-Boskop in type, and sometimes they were short, dark, heavily built negroes, with clumsy hands and feet, more resembling pygmies than Bush-Boskop.
1974 E. Prov. Herald 21 Aug. 10[Raymond Dart] said that Boskop man found in different parts of southern Africa was the ancestor of the Bush-Hottentot type and that there existed a Boskop strain in the African population.
1974 C.T. Binns Warrior People 18The Boskop Skull found in 1913 on a Transvaal farm. ‘A pure-blooded Homo Sapiens,’ according to Dr Bryant, ‘and should be regarded as an ancient member of the stock now represented in S. Africa by Bushmen and Hottentot..divergent branches which have arisen from a common stock and in a collateral line of descent from the Negroes.’
1985 G.T. Nurse et al. Peoples of Sn Afr. 42To equate a proto-Khoisan stage with the existence of the ‘Boskop’ race would be misleading on various grounds (Singer 1958).
1989 Reader’s Digest Illust. Hist. of S. Afr. 19According to the researchers, the Boskop race was uniquely southern African, and by the middle 1900’s at least seven distinct races, each with their own particular traits and cultures, had been identified as being ancestors of ‘Boskop’ man.
Usually attributive (passing into adjective), occasionally predicative:descriptive of the early type of human indicated by the late Pleistocene skull found at Boskop in the North West Province (in what was formerly the Transvaal) in 1913.
Derivatives:
Hence Boskopoid /ˈbɒskəˌpɔɪd//ˈbɔskəpɔɪd/ adjective (also with small initial) [English adjective-forming suffix -oid ‘having the form or nature of, resembling’ (OED)].
1926 Bantu Studies II. 219Comparison has been made mainly with the Boskopoid remains from Zitzikama reported upon..during the last two years, and with the descriptions of the original Boskop remains.
1936 Cambridge Hist. of Brit. Empire VIII. 21Again, stone culture deposits of earlier facies and date than those of the Bushmen have quite recently yielded, at Fish Hoek in the Cape Peninsula, a skeleton belonging to the extinct racial type now termed ‘Boskopoid’.
1970 B. Davidson Old Afr. 29Bushmen, very rare in modern Africa, may represent the only close link with ‘boskopoid’ populations of remote antiquity.
1977 T.R.H. Davenport S. Afr.: Mod. Hist. 10The Cape was thinly populated by sallow-skinned boskopoid hunter-gatherers and herders when the permanent white settlement began in 1652.
1989 Reader’s Digest Illust. Hist. of S. Afr. 19Experts reconstructed a ‘typical’ skull complete with what they referred to as ‘Boskopoid’ features.
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Boskopoid

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