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I think that people constantly devalue the achievements and accomplishments of the ancients (in this case, not ancients literally, but medieval people), and fee

I think that people constantly devalue the achievements and accomplishments of the ancients (in this case, not ancients literally, but medieval people), and feel like they need to resort to lost civilizations or geniuses in the Elysian past. Especially with the Middle Ages-no one wants to admit that they were capable of engineering or scientific achievements.

sdegutis 11y ago
For sure. They weren't idiots, even though they had less information than we have. I mean, they produced people like Thomas Aquinas for goodness' sake. Even though we are more technologically advanced, it started somewhere. I used to ask myself, "I wonder how the ancient Greeks and Romans would have reacted if they had been shown some of our new technology." But then it occurred to me, we're just an evolution of them; in other words, they invented those technologies... but, only after a few hundred years required to get there from where they were.
matthewbauer 11y ago
Human intelligence has remained approximately the same for 50,000 years. The ancient world had its geniuses at the same rate as the modern world. The main difference is whether their environments enabled them to prosper. Europe really had some issues in the post Rome era that meant that most of that talent was not appreciated and lots of knowledge was lost. It sounds like this stuff came from even earlier and had been passed down without knowledge of how they were produced.
- cfcef 11y ago
  > Human intelligence has remained approximately the same for 50,000 years. The ancient world had its geniuses at the same rate as the modern world. No, they didn't. Human genetic intelligence may be the same (although this is doubtful because as ancient genomes slowly become available for analysis, we see ever more signs of huge numbers of frequencies changing in soft selection sweeps when we go back only a few thousand years in Europe, so 50k years...?), but the environments are not nearly the same. The ancient world was absolutely grindingly dirt-poor compared to the modern world, and the negative environmental accordingly huge. (Even things like sanitation may not have made a difference: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/ancient-roman-toilets-gross/423072/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/ancient-ro... ) The most comparable places to the ancient world right now would be somewhere like subsaharan Africa, where between the subsistence agriculture, parasites, poverty, and whatnot, despite the benefits of widespread literacy and vaccines, the average IQ is still quite low, somewhere around IQ 80, or at least 1 standard deviation below the West; with genius at a cutoff of IQ 140 or so, that implies a rate of geniuses much less than 1/8th the Western rate. So no, the rate isn't going to be nearly the same. I would note that it's probably not an accident that when we think of geniuses of antiquity, we tend to think of people drawn from the urban elite of the capital city of empires at their peak (eg Athens, Rome)...
  - nkoren 11y ago
    Ancient Athens, at its peak, had a total population of less than 300,000 people. They represented the urban elite of an empire of a few million people at best. I think it would be difficult to find any comparably-sized contemporary population with a remotely similar genius per capita ratio.
    - cfcef 11y ago
      They probably also benefited from low-hanging fruit. No one today has the opportunity to invent 'logic' or 'the Pythagorean theorem' or 'the tragedy'.
    - _wo6a 11y ago
      Good article on Ancient Greek IQ: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/ancient-greeks-not-geniuses/ http://www.unz.com/akarlin/ancient-greeks-not-geniuses/
  - tamana 11y ago
    You missed the sentence "The main difference is whether their environments enabled them to prosper"
    - cfcef 11y ago
      'Prosper'!='exist'. He claimed they existed. They did not, barring ancient people being some sort of bizarre near-super-human race which can laugh off protein and iodine deficiencies and parasite loads and early-childhood infections in a way modern people can only dream of. This is the same problem you see when people solemnly pontificate about how many Einsteins are trapped in Africa/India and if only we would fund One Laptop Per Child we could unlock their potential...
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    You certainly touch on a lot of sensitive topics in this post. It is an extremely interesting question if the potential genetic intelligence of ancient populations is less than modern populations, but it is not a question you would be wise to study if you want a quiet life.
- Maultasche 11y ago
  I completely agree. I often wonder how many geniuses there were in the ancient and medieval periods that had the potential to make amazing discoveries, but were poor uneducated peasants who had no opportunities to do anything other than farming.

sdegutis 11y ago

For sure. They weren't idiots, even though they had less information than we have. I mean, they produced people like Thomas Aquinas for goodness' sake. Even though we are more technologically advanced, it started somewhere. I used to ask myself, "I wonder how the ancient Greeks and Romans would have reacted if they had been shown some of our new technology." But then it occurred to me, we're just an evolution of them; in other words, they invented those technologies... but, only after a few hundred years required to get there from where they were.

matthewbauer 11y ago

Human intelligence has remained approximately the same for 50,000 years. The ancient world had its geniuses at the same rate as the modern world. The main difference is whether their environments enabled them to prosper. Europe really had some issues in the post Rome era that meant that most of that talent was not appreciated and lots of knowledge was lost. It sounds like this stuff came from even earlier and had been passed down without knowledge of how they were produced.

cfcef 11y ago
> Human intelligence has remained approximately the same for 50,000 years. The ancient world had its geniuses at the same rate as the modern world. No, they didn't. Human genetic intelligence may be the same (although this is doubtful because as ancient genomes slowly become available for analysis, we see ever more signs of huge numbers of frequencies changing in soft selection sweeps when we go back only a few thousand years in Europe, so 50k years...?), but the environments are not nearly the same. The ancient world was absolutely grindingly dirt-poor compared to the modern world, and the negative environmental accordingly huge. (Even things like sanitation may not have made a difference: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/ancient-roman-toilets-gross/423072/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/ancient-ro... ) The most comparable places to the ancient world right now would be somewhere like subsaharan Africa, where between the subsistence agriculture, parasites, poverty, and whatnot, despite the benefits of widespread literacy and vaccines, the average IQ is still quite low, somewhere around IQ 80, or at least 1 standard deviation below the West; with genius at a cutoff of IQ 140 or so, that implies a rate of geniuses much less than 1/8th the Western rate. So no, the rate isn't going to be nearly the same. I would note that it's probably not an accident that when we think of geniuses of antiquity, we tend to think of people drawn from the urban elite of the capital city of empires at their peak (eg Athens, Rome)...
- nkoren 11y ago
  Ancient Athens, at its peak, had a total population of less than 300,000 people. They represented the urban elite of an empire of a few million people at best. I think it would be difficult to find any comparably-sized contemporary population with a remotely similar genius per capita ratio.
  - cfcef 11y ago
    They probably also benefited from low-hanging fruit. No one today has the opportunity to invent 'logic' or 'the Pythagorean theorem' or 'the tragedy'.
  - _wo6a 11y ago
    Good article on Ancient Greek IQ: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/ancient-greeks-not-geniuses/ http://www.unz.com/akarlin/ancient-greeks-not-geniuses/
- tamana 11y ago
  You missed the sentence "The main difference is whether their environments enabled them to prosper"
  - cfcef 11y ago
    'Prosper'!='exist'. He claimed they existed. They did not, barring ancient people being some sort of bizarre near-super-human race which can laugh off protein and iodine deficiencies and parasite loads and early-childhood infections in a way modern people can only dream of. This is the same problem you see when people solemnly pontificate about how many Einsteins are trapped in Africa/India and if only we would fund One Laptop Per Child we could unlock their potential...
- danieltillett 11y ago
  You certainly touch on a lot of sensitive topics in this post. It is an extremely interesting question if the potential genetic intelligence of ancient populations is less than modern populations, but it is not a question you would be wise to study if you want a quiet life.
Maultasche 11y ago
I completely agree. I often wonder how many geniuses there were in the ancient and medieval periods that had the potential to make amazing discoveries, but were poor uneducated peasants who had no opportunities to do anything other than farming.