Aside from knowledge, a lot of what has changed in the last couple thousand years comes down to medicine and nutrition. We’re taller on average than people from the past, for example. But that’s a nutrition thing.

Rather fast is like millions of years in evolutionary terms so 2,000 years is nothing. I don’t even think there’s significant evidence to show that Neanderthals were less intelligent than Homo sapiens and they were around from 400,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago or so. Human brains and also brain-body mass ratio wouldn’t have changed enough to make much of a noticeable difference if you teleport a human baby from thousands of years ago to today and put them through our education system.

It’s just easier to dismiss them as stupid because very little of their life has survived til today.

To the point, I mentioned that Aristotle was 2,400 years ago and you still landed on “largely compatible” lol. The pyramids were built over 4,000 years ago and they’re still a marvel of engineering. You just have a bias against people from thousands of years ago again mostly because a lot of their work didn’t survive to modern day.

I ack that I don't expect much difference in capabilities over 2000ish years, such that I expect I largely agree with you. You are taking "largely compatible" to be a left handed agreement, it seems? I... didn't intend it that way? I flat out agree that I am wrong if discussing people from most of recorded history.

My general question is largely the same, though. Do you think we haven't evolved with more intelligence since proto-human periods? Because that seems to be the claim, that we somehow evolved intelligence, and it has been solely knowledge acquisition since then. I suspect that is defensible, but feels off to me.

And my nitpicks would be that evolution isn't measured in years, but generations. And moves more rapidly when pressure on a population is stronger. Seeing how autistic so many "smart" people act, I confess I would expect more negative pressure on those behaviors in the past.

Yeah, I read “largely compatible” as sort of left-handed or like, not fully the same.

And no, I don’t think there’s a noticeable difference in terms of intelligence between us and someone from 30,000 years ago or even something more extreme like 300,000 years ago. We’re still the same species after all.

I do think you’d be more open to that idea if we had records of their thoughts and ideas. The early humans who came up with epic tales and the explorers who went on grand expeditions to unexplored territories. The people who used an early scientific method to come up with ways to preserve food or figure out what plants were safe to eat. The people who figured out better ways to build clothing for extreme weather. These weren’t dumb people.

I also think you are taking the worst version of my question. I'm not claiming they were dumb. Any more than I think my kids are dumb. But I have seen some of my kids and family where certain mental things "click" far faster than they do for others. To the point that I don't have much trouble claiming some of my family is more intelligent than others. Many of them more so than I am. Many less so, of course.

To that general idea, I similarly have zero issue with claiming some dogs are dumber than other dogs. They obviously all fail at what we would call language skills, in they can form a rudimentary problem solving ability just fine.

And, I can't remember what thread I said it in, but I do stress this isn't a transitive property. It is a lot like someone can be better at sports than someone else, but worse specifically at a specific sport.