for example: if you were to kidnap a prehistoric human baby and give it an education, would it be as smart as a regular human?
In: Biology
There’s no way to know for sure but Humans from 10, or even 20 thousand years ago were likely just as intelligent as we are today. They just didn’t know as much as we do know.
If you took a child from back then and gave it a modern upbringing and education you probably couldn’t tell the difference.
Nobody knows for sure, but it seems likely that they would be pretty similar to us since genetically we’re still basically the same. So a prehistoric human baby raised in the modern world would likely be indistinguishable from anyone else
Humans arrived in Australia at least 50,000 years ago – and have the same intellectual capacity as other modern humans (there is some suggestion they have a slightly higher IQ). Their ancestors must have left Africa maybe 80,000 years ago. Anatomically modern human fossils in Africa date back at least 150,000 years and probably more like 200,000. Neanderthals had language and complex tools – and they split from the modern lineage maybe 600,000 years back. So chances are the average human that far back was in the same intellectual ball park as us.
Further back, there’s probably a steady diminution as you go back through the human lineage.
kurzgesagt did an episode about this and the answer was you could go back about 70,000 years and kidnap a baby and they would grow up normal. Any further back and they might lack specific gene mutations for developing complex language.
“Prehistoric” is a pretty big category. . H. Sapiens sapiens…yes, certainly back to 50,000 ya and plausibly to 150,000 ya. Some might actually be smarter, brain size has decreased a bit from the maximum. Neanderthals…maybe? A lot of anthropologists would love to know the answer to that one. H. erectus? no way.
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