People thousands of years ago were not dumb. They had probably roughly the same pattern recognition skills as you or I. Just because they didn't have "physics"

People thousands of years ago were not dumb. They had probably roughly the same pattern recognition skills as you or I. Just because they didn't have "physics" (mechanistic explanations of the effects they observed) doesn't mean they didn't have some understanding of good vs bad stuff. Take the entirety of Chinese medicine, for example: there is a reason it's still popular, in that it works. It may not work how we think it "should" per Western standards in terms of direct methods of action of known compounds in the substances being ingested, but it still works: probably some combination of actual "healthy" compounds as well as a good dose of placebo. Diets were likely similar for those of old: that guy over there only eats berries and rabbits and somehow he's been fine this whole time! He is strong like a bear, because he eats the things bears eat. This guy over here eats only foraged greens and is suffering from something we can't discern so we just say the forest spirits are mad at him. Observational learning is present in many animals of much lower intelligence than humans even tens of thousands of years ago. Patronizing speculations of historical people only serves to obscure the notion of civilization's progress over these long time spans so what, we can pretend time began when writing started?