What do you mean "us" Hiawatha? <Take agriculture for another. Talk about a no-brainer, although it took us millions of years to figure it out, once we did, > For a start, you aren't that old, and agriculture was invented in the Middle East [so they say, but I'd be surprised if there weren't a few plantings here and there to encourage especially useful trees].
Anyway, my theory is that human intelligence has developed very rapidly over the last 10,000 years, by way of selection and breeding rather than new mutations, but there might have been some new mutations too which didn't hurt.
So, average intelligence now is much more than 1000 years ago and 10,000 years ago.
Look at the difference between African intelligence and others for an example of how big the differences can be. And Africans haven't stood still for 10,000 years, with genes flowing around the mass of humans as women hop the fence and join another village as primate females do. Males did a similar thing by marauding into neighbouring regions. The smart guys with sharper spears and onagers did better than those with fists and sticks. Genghis Khan went all the way to Turkey! He wasn't like modern tourists visiting Disneyland. He carried weapons!
So it wasn't that we hung around waiting for a light bulb to go on about agriculture and inventing Globalstar. It was a matter of producing sufficient brainpower in the gene pool. One bright guy wasn't enough. It needed a lot. There was a lot of winnowing to get the good genes.
It wasn't a no-brainer, it was a brainer! The no-brainers didn't have enough to figure it out.
Mqurice |
