> It feels like there should have been other species along the evolutionary road with culture, basic agriculture and arithmetic etc. There were, other hominids

> It feels like there should have been other species along the evolutionary road with culture, basic agriculture and arithmetic etc. There were, other hominids. We exterminated them/added their diversity to our own. Tibetans have adaptations to high altitude that pre-date the emergence of Homo Sapiens because a small part of their ancestry is Denisovan. > Why did something click and suddenly we're smart enough to build rockets, fly to other planets, split the atom, and reason about the very nature of reality? There was no click. There was nothing terribly sudden about it on any human timescale. 200,000 years ago we were anatomically modern. There were almost certainly some individuals then who could be acculturated to now, if transport was possible. It took over 150,000 years to develop settled agriculture. All that time those people were smart enough to reason. What eventually happened was cultural accumulation more than any genetic change. We are the dumbest possible species that is capable of what we do. Otherwise we’d have done it earlier.