[AlphaOne1]

The title of this article reminded me of a thought provoking book by GK Chesterton, "The Everlasting Man", obviously he write from a religious perspective but one discussion raised a question that I had not considered before. Why do we assume primitive man was any less intelligent or artistic than we are now?

"Human civilization is older than human records. That is the sane way of stating our relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples of its other arts earlier than the art of writing; or at least of any writing that we can read. [..] In short, the prehistoric period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period. It does not mean the time before civilization or the time before arts and crafts. It simply means the time before any connected narratives that we can read. This does indeed make all the practical difference between remembrance and forgetfulness;" [1]

[1]https://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlastin...

[delecti]

I love the thought of humanity being constant like that. Examples of things like prehistoric people drawing dicks on things, or "<name> was here" written on various ancient walls, all really emphasize that humans have been basically the same for a long time. "It was part of a fertility ritual" is one explanation, or another is that people have just always drawn dicks on things.

[actionfromafar]

On some deep level it is a fertility ritual. Today, I mean.

[checkyoursudo]

I had a debate in a computational intelligence course in grad school that veered off from the topic of embodied cognition somehow into the advance of human culture. (During class; no mind-altering substances included.)

The crux of the debate was, on one side, two of us saying there is no such thing as advancement in culture (art, music, taste, etc), only in science (knowledge) and technology (application); while the other side insisted that culture does indeed progress. It was an interesting debate. I still think that no culture is significantly more advanced culturally than any other probably going back many tens of thousands of years (or maybe ever? I don't know). Art or music or cuisine, etc, that invokes the intended emotional, cognitive, etc response is doing what it is supposed to do. Any preference to modern over ancient is purely subjective and nullified by any preference to ancient over modern.

I would therefore agree that modern humans are not more artistic.

However, as someone who studies intelligence, I would say that because of modern nutrition, medicine, evolution, and adaptation, modern humans are probably a tiny bit more intelligent than ancient humans. I would guess that someone alive 50,000 years ago who was transported to today and raised as a modern human would have little trouble, but that the average ancient human would probably be slightly less intelligent than the average modern human.

Hell, if the Flynn effect proves to be real, then the average grandparent may be slightly less intelligent than the average grandchild. Just in a couple generations. Over the course of dozens or hundreds of human generations, the difference would not be zero.

[hnfong]

> However, as someone who studies intelligence, I would say that because of modern nutrition, medicine, evolution, and adaptation, modern humans are probably a tiny bit more intelligent than ancient humans. I would guess that someone alive 50,000 years ago who was transported to today and raised as a modern human would have little trouble, but that the average ancient human would probably be slightly less intelligent than the average modern human.

Modern humans allegedly have slightly smaller brains than humans 3000 years ago. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220503-why-human-brains...

There's also the question of what we are actually measuring when we talk about "intelligence". It seems this is at least somewhat culturally subjective. This means that while you might be technically correct, people 50000 years ago might value aspects of intelligence that is slightly different, and they may excel in those aspects instead.

----

In general, I don't know whether there can be any meaningful conclusion on whether "culture" advances. To me culture is always a matter of gaining a focus on one aspect and losing focus on another at the same time. I.e. a matter of preference and taste. Is there really something as "better" taste in general? Yes if you impose your subjective views onto to others, and no if you are fundamentally egalitarian or relativist. But then if you measure specifics (eg. how life-like/realistic were the paintings? How harmonious were the music?) you'll get some trends. The problem is that those trends aren't necessarily "improvement" if those aspects are subjectively considered a negative trait.

[agumonkey]

I'd add one argument about art: living in a "primitive" state full of unknowns promotes imagination a few orders of magnitude.

Another one: I make a parallel with pre-tooled humans that these people long ago were living on a thin line and had to be extremely lean and yet wildly efficient all the time, you don't have much time to craft a spear and it better be lethal when you finally approach a prey. And you do this with your hands. It looks as stupid as senior writing a few lines of code and looking dumb when it fact it's 80% right the first time.