If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?
I could point at all the self-help books that promise to improve the way you think, or Wikipedias list of fallacies, but I don't those are great examples either. It's frustrating that I can't make a simple point just because it needs more research. I hoped people would find better examples themselves.
I don't think your word "tremendous" works, I think superstition declined and values improved, but it's hard to nail this down for people who are keen to disagree. Does that include you? Why?
Outside of the "so mainstream and prevalent we don't even consider it" superstitions (which, remember, were all the historical ones we may dismiss now, thousand years later), we have horoscope and astrology, psychics, and people who think wearing same socks will help them on a winning streak, and everybody hesitant to talk about good or bad outcomes less they "jinx it". Maybe you're from Germany or Scandinavia and your daily experience is different?
But again, the thread started about biological differences and I will agree that there are little to none between ancient Egyptians and modern humans.
In terms of cultural values, sanctity of life, freedoms and poverty and lifestyle, I do think some things have improved. We can debate numbers as to how much.
Understand that as a Canadian, and not knowing where you're from, you unfortunately find me at a cynical time as we watch our southern neighbour work so very very hard to dismantle much of the progress we are discussing here very every effectively, so it's just difficult to put one's mind in historically optimistic mindset :-/
Romans had educated intellectuals who had some progressive and scientific ideas, and the less educated masses who had less progressive and educated ideas. This seems to describe today's world well. And we still LOVE to attack the "intellectual elite" for having progressive, scientific ideas.
Just because in polls only 4-6% will identity with "atheist" doesn't mean the rest are severely impaired by superstitious beliefs.
I actually think "not impaired by superstitious beliefs" is somewhere between "less than 1%" and "zero", myself sadly included. For "severely" we have to set up some definitions and thresholds.
I don't think we are meaningfully different at all. The same types and groups of people and social structures all still exist today. I suppose the big difference is those of us who are well adjusted know that racism is not good, and tarot cards are meaningless woo woo. But there were also such skeptics back then too.
So I object to this weird article of faith every time it comes up, we can't have been exactly as sensible and exactly as clever in the past as we are today, it doesn't make any sense to say that. But it's somehow become right-on to say that it's so, as if denying it is a prejudice like timeism or something. It obviously matters to some world view, equality maybe?
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.
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.
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.
You lacked the idea of begging the question seemingly.
>I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking.
I believe there is one idea that they lacked which is that of the Scientific Method, and perhaps some others that helped ignite the Industrial Revolution.
However
>That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them.
No, that does not follow at all. For that to follow you would have to show that those ideas were more valuable to the process of thinking than all the others that they did have.
Furthermore there has been sufficient argument already put forth here in this thread that their abilities at memorization and rhetoric provided a better ground for thinking than a lot of modern people possess, you would have to show that these ideas they did not possess are of so much greater value that they essentially negate the things in which they show superior skills.
You might suppose that to do this all you would need to do is to point around at the highly technological world we live in, but this would be seem to be a categorical error because we are discussing their ability to think not their technological levels. You could make the argument that the superior technology is the output of the process of thought, but I don't think an HN post will be sufficient to make that argument.
Finally assuming the Scientific Method was so superior an idea that it made the Ancients worse at thinking it would actually only make them worse at thinking than people who reasonably understand and apply the Scientific Method in their daily lives, which one look at the news should tell you is not that many people.
OK, good logic. But that implies could be still very valuable ideas of the ancients which are now lost. I suppose that's what classicism was all about. But we've been through classicism already a couple of times (starting in the renaissance). It seems likely we caught up with most of the powerful ideas of the ancient world.
I'm picking up a "bring back the seven liberal arts!" vibe from your comment, and it has a certain something going for it as an idea, I must admit. Even so ...
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.
Life expectancy means at birth commonly. Life expectancy changed because infant and child mortality changed.
When I was in nautical school, I was taught to always be aware of sea state regardless of where I was/what I was doing so I'd get in the habit of always knowing what the sea was doing.
Now I live on a farm. We are always very aware of the weather and instinctively comparing what we see around us to what the forecasts say.
When I lived in a city, I was barely aware of even if it was supposed to rain later or not. Going from your climate-controlled house to your climate-controlled car, to your climate-controlled job, you simply don't notice those things except superficially.
Basically I think we have to pick a lane on whether we are talking biology, vs culture, vs knowledge and accumulated data.
Again, welcome to reality, meet some racists. They make the majority of population :O
More seriously and in the spirit of HN: Because a lot of people, per the original post, assume ancient people were fundamentally, biologically, less intelligent. Couple of reasons:
1. We teach people about evolution and Neanderthals etc, but it's hard for most of us to grasp the time scales. People conflate "Egyptians 5 thousand years ago" and "australopithecus 5 million years ago".
2. As many many people do today, we also conflate circumstances with inherent - like we've seen several times in this very thread, because people 5k years ago they didn't have technology or knowledge of today, there's subconscious assumption they weren't fundamentally as intelligent as capable.
Original post had a simple and specific claim: Egyptians 5k years ago were biologically equivalent to humans today and their intelligence was just as high. Raise them in modern society and you'd get the same bell curve.
That claim alone is mind blowing to many.