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Comment by sfblah | Hacker News Reader

How do we know they were as smart as we are?

An axiom of every discussion you'll ever have is that all populations have exactly the same mean and standard deviation for every single measurable psychological trait that you can think of.

Which is all out wrong if you look at the literature. Nutrition, education, nurturing young, and inbreeding can have profound effects.

I suspect the person you replied to was being highly sarcastic in their reply. It's a highly charged area due to the history of race relations in the US.

Thanks, should have guessed, but I tend to assume the worst these days

Mutations accumulate at a slow enough rate so that we know that they are very, very similar to modern humans as 24000 years is a very short time for that; and the reasonable proxies for intelligence that can be measured archeologically i.e. brain volume are the same or even in their favor.

The American peoples split off from the Asian peoples 25,000 years ago, and are the same intelligence today.

That would seem unlikely unless they were the same then as today.

Asians are smarter though

Not enough to be considered a different species.

I don't think that's relevant here. There is almost a 10 point variation between Japan's average IQ and United States. That's quite a lot.

It seems quite plausible older humans could all be significantly below 100 average and have just not figured anything out.

That would fly in the face of nature, where wild animals are almost universally more cognitively resourceful than domesticated versions.

Its special pleading to say humans should be different.

There's wild humans today living in tribes in Amazon jungle and papua new guinea and africa. They're some of the lowest average IQ in the world.

And they would laugh at you and think you're a dullard for not being able to navigate in the jungle and identify every plant you come across.

IQ tests have ingrained cultural factors just like the standards of intelligence those tribes have.

I find how misleading these illustrations are, hilarious. The average European looked subsaharan African (chedderman) 9-10k years ago, but 24k years ago, I'm supposed to believe light skinned Asians with thin straight hair existed.

This is absolutey wrong and is history denial. Black people were in the Americas long before the Olmecs in central America (another ancient African civilization).

All these "Asian" people were highly melanated black people, (Asian historians understand this fact) and they are descendants of mostly fishermen related to Khoikhoi and modern day Xhosa people of south Africa.

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