[marktwain]

The more I read of the past, the more I believe our ancestors, to perhaps a hundred thousand years ago, were just as smart as us, probably moreso.

They had to be, just to survive.

[SunkenCiv]

Well put. They weren't any stronger swimmers than we are, that's for sure. :^)

[PIF]

and just think most of those people lived in what is now 400 feet below the oceans, but was then ocean front and river mouths. Now buried under who knows how many feet of mud and silt.

[hinckley buzzard]

Yes. There is no reason to believe that we are any smarter than our ancestors. If one compares the wisdom of the Ancients to culture today, we may in fact have become significantly dumber. Technology is knowledge based, which accumulates with time; wisdom has to be re-acquired in every generation, and lately we have been flunking big time.

[fr_freak]

The more I read of the past, the more I believe our ancestors, to perhaps a hundred thousand years ago, were just as smart as us, probably moreso.

I think that ease of living, among other things, has resulted in an IQ drop in modern people. The Idiocracy principle, in effect. People would, indeed, have to have been smart to survive in harsher, more primitive conditions.

However, I am now also open to the possibility that there were advanced civilizations that existed long before these more primitive times, due to analyses of things like the level of engineering that went into the Great Pyramids (that we can't duplicate even today), the true age of the Sphinx being at least 12-13,000 years, and the existence of the underground city of Göbekli Tepe, which is at least 10,000 years old.

Modern "science" tries to paint the humans of the past as being barely-evolved cavemen who improved over time until they reached the current apex, but more and more I think that is mere conceit.