Are people, human beings, more clever today than they were 100,000 years ago?

Of course, we have virtually no evidence about that,

but going from first principles and from my feeling of what the situation has been,

definitely not.

They were definitely our equals in mental capacity

and in anything physiological to do with thought or understanding, they were our equals.

The difference between us and them is culture and technology.

So those are beyond comparison different today, but they have only been beyond comparison

different for a few hundred years, like since the Enlightenment.

Before that, people were much like they had been in prehistoric times.

Well, this is the interesting thing.

A lot of people will look to our ancestors and implicitly assume that they must have been pretty

stupid.

I mean, these fools running around just about working out how to use fire, didn't invent

the wheel for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, they must have been

pretty stupid. The question is, if our brain structures are essentially the same, evolution works

on an unfathomably sort of long stretch of time, we haven't had enough time for our brains to

significantly evolve since

you know, 10,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago. Quite so, probably more. Yeah.

Why then, in the last few hundred years, in particular, but I suppose in the last few thousand

years, really, if we're talking about society, have we managed to go from these

helpless apes wandering around and about the middle of the food chain to just dominating the

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