> Our ancestors 5000 and 10000 years ago were just as smart , intelligent and curios as we are today. That sounds nice but axiomatic egalitarianism might, just

> Our ancestors 5000 and 10000 years ago were just as smart , intelligent and curios as we are today. That sounds nice but axiomatic egalitarianism might, just might, not be empirically true. We know that there are vast differences in all modern uniform populations we have tested -- intelligence is normally distributed and the differences between the tails are huge. We also know that different populations have different distributions -- slightly different standard deviations, sometimes vastly different means. Why wouldn't that also have been true at the dawn of history and in pre-history? Since we do now know many alleles that influence intelligence and we roughly know their effect sizes (very small for almost all of them) and since we can actually sequence really old DNA in some cases, we can actually come up with reasonable guesses for how intelligent people were thousands of years ago. And what do you know? They do differ. Or at least, their allele frequencies do for those alleles that we are pretty sure have an influence on intelligence. Some of them really do seem to have been pretty dim. Others not so dim. PS: It's difficult to make an iron sword/knife/axe that is better than a bronze one.