People tend to do that because they attribute less capable technology with intelligence.
You may need to be *more* intelligent to survive with less effective tech.
My studies of history and prehistory indicate most older populations were as smart as us, if not smarter.
They were limited by tech, but not because of a lack of intelligence.
We have no idea what ‘technology’ became available to people who thought in very different ways.
(It’s always kind of funny to me when people say that the Egyptians ‘couldn’t have built the Pyramids’ - so it must have been ‘aliens’. Do these people realize how OLD Egyptian civilization was before the first pyramid was built? Do they have any idea of the depth and profundity of their ways of thinking, and their philosophies?)
Today we’re so tall because we stand on the shoulders of giants, who also stand on bigger giants, who then again stand on even bigger giants. Giants all the way down.