This. The educational system, willingly or just incompetently manages to instill a sense that human intelligence somehow grows monotonically with historical time. Maybe thats because it is conflating it with knowledge accumulation and never bothering to make a clear distinction.
In fact its very plausible that 30000 years ago some homo sapiens had a discussion around a campfire that was as intelligent as your average HN thread :-)
Part of what I know about basic statistics I got from an old book. I would not be able to draw on those concepts and present a coherent argument if my experience and communicative tools were limited to what they would have been 30,000 years ago.
That said, they may have had very intelligent and nuanced discussions about specific topics, like immediately human experiences such as illness, politics, fashion, love, etc.
Instead perhaps the local priest might have discussed the next sacrifice needed to bring the rains.
Why do you say politics didn’t exist long ago?
> Instead perhaps the local priest might have discussed the next sacrifice needed to bring the rains.
So… politics?
For as long as there has been humans, there has been politics.
The 2 party corrupt form of politics that is the mainstay in US does not require reasoning ability beyond the ability of a 30'000 Homo Sapien?
It might my definition of politics but I doubt very much that what our ancestors were practicing 30k years ago wasn't politic in any sense that we could understand.
Communally sharing knowledge about watering holes and what the next door tribe was doing was probably more along the lines of what was discussed.
Societal informational interchange isn't politic. Politic is, for me, a group of people coming together (I.e. The ruling class) and deciding what the group as a whole (i.e. Everyone else) should be doing.
On the other hand there are definitely cultural inflection points (like writing or numeracy) that seem to have reshaped the ability of a trained brain in a very short period of time. E.g. if you compare writings from the same civilization / region just several hundred years apart (Homeric poems vs Classic Athenian philosophy) its hard to believe its even the same species...
Grade inflation has a lot to answer for. It's a serious problem in the UK but understandable, all statistics are designed to bolster the image of the organisation producing them.
Several remarks here. It is growing with time. Average IQ grows every year such that they have to re-normalize it all the time. This is on a very short timescale though.
Second, there is logic behind an actual theory that prehistoric humans were actually SMARTER then modern day humans. A human back in the day had much more to deal with in order to survive. Nowadays you can get away with working at menial and repetitive jobs. This implies that there is less recent evolutionary pressure for maintaining high intelligence indicating at the possibility of humans becoming stupider in modern times.