[Traubenfuchs]

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge.

Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.

[komali2]

From what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would be slightly behind ours. Take a look at "wild children" for the very few examples we can find of modern humans developed without culture. Seems like above everything, our culture, society, and thus education is what makes us smart. And our incredibly high calorie food, of course.

[pferde]

That is exactly what civilization is about - for new generations to start not from scratch, but from some baseline their parents achieved (accumulated knowledge and culture). This allows new generations to push forward instead of retreading the same path.

[m_mueller]

it's impossible to prove the counterfactual (I guess, as I imagine we don't have enough gene information that far back). But I'd imagine that the high calorie food you can get starting with the advent of agriculture is exactly what could drive evolution in a certain direction that helps brains grow. We've had ~1000 generations since then, that should be enough for some change to happen. Our brains use up 20% of the body's energy. Do we know that this was already the case during the stone age?

[adrian_b]

The advent of agriculture did not provide better food, it was just the only solution to avoid extinction due to the lack of food.

The archaeological evidence shows that for many generations the first neolithic farmers had serious health problems in comparison with their ancestors. Therefore it is quite certain that they did not transition to agriculture willingly, but to avoid starvation.

Later, when the agriculturalists have displaced everywhere the hunter-gatherers, they did not succeed to do this because they were individually better fed or stronger or smarter, but only because there were much more of them.

The hunter-gatherers required very large territories from which to obtain enough food. For a given territory size, practicing agriculture could sustain a many times greater population, and this was its advantage.

The maximum human brain size had been reached hundreds of thousands years before the development of agriculture, and it regressed a little after that.

There is a theory, which I consider plausible, that the great increase in size of the human brain has been enabled by the fact that humans were able to extract bone marrow from bones, which provided both the high amount of calories and the long-chain fatty acids that are required for a big brain.

[m_mueller]

I've seen the bone marrow hypothesis also, which is very interesting. Afaik. evidence shows at least that there was enough specialization during neolithic era to have bone marrow cooks where the hunters delivered their bones. Something you wouldn't expect based on just school knowledge (at least back in 90s/2000s).

I see your point about agriculture at first degrading quality of food. Are you aware of evidence of brain size degrading even? Is it visible in the temple bones?

[adrian_b]

It is known that 200k years ago human brain sizes were actually greater than today, even if this does not necessarily correlate with a lower IQ in the present, because it is more likely that the parts of the brain that have reduced may have been related with things like fine motor skills and spatial orientation, which are no longer important today for most people.

[21asdffdsa12]

Its complicated. It depends.

A human being has the potential for intelligence. For that to get realized, you need circumstances, you need culture aka "societal" software and the resources to suspend the grind of work in formative years and allow for the speed-running of the process of knowledge preloading before the brain gets stable.

The parents then must support this endeavor under sacrifices.

There is also a ton of chicken-egg catch22s buried in this whole thing.

If the society is not rich then no school, instead childlabour. If child-labour society is pre-industrial ineffective and thus, no riches to support and redistribute.

Also is your societies culture root-hardened. Means - on a collapse of complexity in bad times, can it recover even powering through the usual "redistribute the nuts and bolts from the bakery" sentiments rampant in bad times. Can it stay organize and organize centralizing of funds for new endeavors. Organizing a sailing ship in a medieval society, means in every village 1 person starves to death. Can your society accomplish that without riots?

Thus.

[Traubenfuchs]

> A human being has the potential for intelligence.

Were we "human" 200.000 years ago the way we are now?

Was the required brain and vocal hardware present?

[applfanboysbgon]

Of course they were. A human from 200,000 years ago would be almost genetically identical to one from today. That's what makes us homo sapiens. 200,000 years is absolutely nothing on an evolutionary timescale with generations as long as ours and reproduction rates as low as ours.

[tmoravec]

Yes. Some important parts of the software, like complex tools, art, or the use of symbols only appeared between 100.000 and 50.000 years ago, however.

[21asdffdsa12]

A human is more then the hardware. A human is hardware with cultural software. A human is decorated with parental education. A human is decorated with local cultural influences. A human inherits his economic circumstances and behavior.

A modern human is a complex artifact and can not be produced everywhere. The ability to cooperate, form institutions and build complex tools may be severely restricted even today. Of course its also restricted in the past.

[21asdffdsa12]

A human is more then the hardware.

A human is hardware with cultural software.

A human is decorated with parental education.

A human is decorated with local cultural influences.

A human inherits his economic circumstances and behavior.

A modern human is a complex artifact and can not be produced everywhere. The ability to cooperate, form institutions and build complex tools may be severely restricted even today. Of course its also restricted in the past.

[lucianbr]

Can you articulate why you think so? This kind of response "I just don't agree" reads as zero useful information. At least to me.

[Traubenfuchs]

Evolutionary brain development.

We all come from monke, monkey from 10 million years ago would definitely be unable to even learn spoken language at a basic level. Would he even have the anatomy to produce the required sounds? I don't think so.

What about monke from 1 million years ago? 200 thousand years ago?

ChatGpt says spoken language only emerged 50k - 200k years ago and that a cavemen baby from 200k years ago could learn spoken language if brought up by modern parents.

But I prefer human answers over AI slop.

[adrian_b]

The evolution of the human brain appears to have reached its peak long before 200k years ago.

Nowadays humans have smaller brains on average, though that is almost certainly not correlated with a lower skill in computer programming, but with lower skills in the techniques that one needed to survive as a hunter of big animals.

[seiferteric]

How could we know this? AFAIK all we can say is the volume of the brain has been relatively stable for that long, how can we say the structures of the brain have not evolved since then? It seems plausible to me anyway that humans could have co-evolved with ideas in a way.