Ancient human ancestors carved handaxe from a hippo femur 1.4M years ago: study

Do you have more info on this idea? What approach did researchers use to try to measure intelligence based on cultural artifacts used in a context we can't see for purposes we can only guess at?

>that's only 80 mental mutations between us and the Homo species that made this axe.

To this

>These guys were just about as smart as us.

You don't know how much of an influence any individual mutation could have made. Also there's no reason to suspect more than [or less than] one mutation per generation.

Just look at the range of "gifted" people in our society - mutations which likely enable savants and such. Men like Newton and Da Vinci, if their successes are due to genetic mutations (I suspect to a significant degree this is the case) placed in another time could individually make the difference between a stone and metal age.

Point being, 80 generations of mutation may be enough to drastically change the human mind - especially considering the immense selection pressure for certain kinds of intelligence, which varies with culture and technology (e.g. stone vs metal age).

Edit: I suppose this comes down to how much evolution you believe happens in the form of punctuated equilibria

From a paper describing "the Romulus and Remus hypothesis"[1],

"the leap from rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to recursive language 70,000 years ago was associated with acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called Prefrontal Synthesis, enabled by a mutation that slowed down the prefrontal cortex maturation simultaneously in two or more children"

1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v9.full

And here's a summary: https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-...

I don't understand that. How could relative intelligence be inferred from just the number of mutation that occurred? I'm no biologist, but from what I understand a single genetic mutation might have a huge effect or a very minor effect.

You probably didn't mean to step in a minefield here, but not all human populations have Neanderthal genes. The prevailing thesis is that mostly complete (minus fiddling like lactose tolerance and pigmentation) modern humans were involved in the out-of-Africa migration ~60k-100k years ago.

Are we ancestors of a common and small band of winning apes, who won our over those of a quite different mindset? Some tribe of fifty or so individuals that eradicated all of the competition?

In another timeline we might have evolved into speechless and peaceful gentle folk instead of the tribes of ruthless competitors that make up today’s world. And markedly less populous too, maybe, and probably without making footprints on the moon or conceiving plutonium warheads. Maybe just as likely to have done so, maybe even sooner than our current version of the species.

Yet another reason to pick up Niven’s Ringworld some time soon. In that case it was de-evolution, but the ideas feel similar.

Iodine consumption alone is responsible for a moderate IQ boost (15 points). And if you start making nutrition worse, you will see more cognitive impact.

During pregnancy, they could not go to the doctor and get their blood tested and given dietary supplements. And newborns did not have access to baby formula when the mother's milk supply was insufficient. These factors can also result in lower IQ.

Humans mixed with neanderthals because they had an immunological advantange. Anatomically modern humans inhabited Africa, Neanderthals inhabited other regions. Neanderthal territories had different pathogens that Neanderthals were better prepared to deal with, so the humans that mixed with neanderthals were healthier that the ones that did not. Eventually most neanderthal genes not related to immunity were knocked out from the gene pool by natural selection.

Environmentally we know if you took a modern human back then they will be at least 20 IQ points less. Probably far more from lack of micro-nutrients and the Flynn Effect.

On top of that our IQ will have changed over hundreds of years. We have evolved living in cities, it genetically changed our minds, see the Peppered moth for the cliche on cities and evolution.

It's probably only in the last 100 years our evolution has stopped, perhaps moving backwards but we are going full into intelligent design.

Be careful saying that if your HN account can be linked to your real identity. I've seen some people get #cancelled for that.

You can go from average dog, to a distinct breed of dog (behaviourally or physically) within very few generations. This doesn't require new genes, or many of them. Natural selection can also work pretty fast this way.

YNH's theory is that evolution of "superintelligence" is memetic, rather than genetic. Starting at about 100kya, cultural evolution was taking over as the main factor driving behavioural changes.

> There's evidence from cultural artifacts that even 100,000 years ago humans were less intelligent then us.

The same could be said about 10kya or 1kya. Medieval artifacts are far less sophisticated than ours. The brains are similar.

So I would not be surprised if it was extreme confidence.

People are incredible hunters, those that specialize in hunting. Crafty, dangerous, innovative. We have plenty of modern examples of people hunting dangerous animals with very basic tools. An average lion pride can't kill an elephant. A specialized lion pride can. Humans are like this, but way more. Way, way more.

My default assumption is "these people knew how to hunt hippos." A neighboring band may not have.