Yes, that's my point exactly. Sub-Saharan African societies are at roughly the same level of technological and social development as Europe was thousands of years ago, apart from the technology and other know-how that was imported to Sub-Saharan Africa by much-maligned European colonial empires.
Again, you are mixing up ‘the current state of local technological development’ with ‘the innate cognitive capacity of the people living there.’ That is a fundamental error.
The history of technological development is driven by a massive set of variables—access to domesticable plants and animals, the ability to build large-scale irrigation, the presence of navigable waterways, and immunity to regional diseases. These were geographic accidents that allowed for the early establishment of surplus food, which in turn allowed for the specialization—writing, complex bureaucracy, science—that defines what you call ‘developed.’
To say that a population is ‘thousands of years behind’ because their ancestors lived in a different ecological niche is to mistake geography for biology. We see this debunked constantly: when individuals from these ‘less developed’ regions are raised in, and integrated into, high-functioning institutional environments, they frequently go on to achieve at the same level as anyone else.
The key word is “integrated”
Ie they should be made to accept the societal mores and culture of the culture they move to.
If your argument were true—that these people are biologically fixed at a lower stage of development—then we should see a total inability for these individuals to navigate, master, or contribute to modern systems. We don’t see that. We see people from all over the world entering modern, high-tech societies and succeeding. The bottleneck isn’t the ‘nature’ of the people; it’s the lack of the very institutional, legal, and economic infrastructure that you seem to think is a biological trait rather than a societal one