[thewebguyd]

I didn't downvote you.

But, I'm not saying that humans haven't learned anything, but that cognitively we haven't changed. A roman citizen has the exact same brain capacity to reason and adapt as we do today. There is zero separation from ancient human vs. modern human in that aspect.

You are conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence. That roman looking at bird entrails to predict the future was using the exact same pattern-recognition ability we use today to look at data visualizations, or trend graphs.

You could go back in time, steal an ancient roman baby, and raise them in today's year and they would be no different from you or I.

[bjt]

I agree with the "steal an ancient roman baby" premise. The "roman citizen" example is not as strong. Cognitive ability is not just genetics. The grown-up roman would be missing a lot of advantages during their upbringing that weren't available back then. Also, limiting it to just "citizens" means limiting it to their upper class.

Compared to Roman times, we've had pretty big advances in nutrition, healthcare, education, and widespread middle class wealth. It's not unreasonable to infer that these would have an impact on cognitive ability similar to the effect they've had on life expectancy.

That being said, there's definitely a present-ist bias, as the McSweeney's article does a good job mocking. I do believe their best thinkers were as good as our best thinkers.

[constantius]

Life expectancy didn't change that much, what changed is infant mortality.

And for cognitive ability: plenty of firsthand accounts from Enlightenment thinkers about thesuperior reasoning abilities of average members of hunter-gatherer/American Indian tribes compared to the typical European at the time, and they arguably already had better access to nutrition/education/healthcare.

Cognitive ability is for sure related to some extent to these factors, but actual practice of reasoning (through public debates, leisure time, storytelling) seems to have been much more influential on the actual realisation of cognitive potential, and I'm not sure there'd be a stark difference between a typical human today, or even a typical Westerner, vs a typical Roman citizen.

[jleyank]

Plato begs to differ re: philosophy. Ancient people could memorize staggeringly more than folks today. They probably also paid (far) more attention to their surroundings. Like Rangers in D&D, they could read blades of grass and state what/when walked by...

[pseudalopex]

> Life expectancy didn't change that much, what changed is infant mortality.

Life expectancy means at birth commonly. Life expectancy changed because infant and child mortality changed.

[jleyank]

Same religions. Same political structures. Same engineering - we've only recently duplicated their concrete, and man, could they build roads and aqueducts. Yeah, they had a dodgy number system, but they had military and political organizations that lasted 1000+ years. They had worldwide trade, and unified far more territory than anybody today.

[card_zero]

Well no, not even as good. For instance, your comment invokes the idea of prejudice, and the value of being unprejudiced. Did Romans know about that, and consider it important? Maybe, I couldn't say offhand, but my point is that they might not have had some valuable idea like that. I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking. That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them. This doesn't of course mean that their best ideas were bad though!

[card_zero]

Yes, of course that's right. But I thought you were the one conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence, when you said "behaviorally". Behaviors being due to ideas, not nature (I don't much rate nature's effect on smarts anyway).

Maybe I need to spell this distinction out next time it comes up, which will be the next ancient history thread, probably. I guess the endless repetition of "they were just as smart as we were you know!" is in order to counteract an unstated idea that the ancients were some other species, like orangutans in bronze armor, I don't know. Maybe it's common to vaguely think that about them? But this gratuitous counter-point should be on a strictly genetic basis, or else you'd be accidentally denying that ideas improve.