Can we be so sure? Our tools have evolved and become more sophisticated thanks for our industry for sure, but that says nothing of intelligence per se.
How much more or less sophisticated and creative were humans only 150/200 years ago? Yet, technologically... things have moved quite a bit. Technology that has built upon a lot of precedents.
We have enough studies on the impacts of nutrition in the womb and the impact of experience and neglect on brain development in children that we can be sure that intelligence is more advanced. More complex languages leads to more complex thoughts. Better nutrition leads to greater intelligence. Both for our normal communication but also for languages to describe abstract ideas like mathematics.
If this still doesn't sound definite, then I think we are getting into the issue of what is intelligence and how do you measure it in a person or a population. But then we would need to get into answering just how can we be sure humans are more intelligent than a wide selection of animals and even non-animals. Same for creativity and sophistication.
If we look at history back until the industrial revolution, I would guess that less people had to work on food production and thus could go into creative fields.
Intelligence is better measurable through IQ tests and we can see IQ score rising in societies today. (Flynn Effect)
I'm not sure high IQ people from today would make it far in more ancient times, and not because smarter or dumber, but only because they are unadapted.
It's not though. It's the opposite, and that's what makes it interesting, and why it's being measured. The g factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
General intelligence is related to the ability to learn new things in general, no matter the context.
And today's humans, would, if they got to start as babies 20k years ago, learn all there was to know, about that world. And they'd start feeling bored. Maybe they'd try to build and invent things, just to escape the otherwise for-the-brain empty days.
(You somehow got it the other way around :-) I wonder how you formed your opinions / beliefs about intelligence? If it's ok if I ask)
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If, in your comment, replace IQ with "wisdom" and "knowledge", then it makes sense. A grown up human of toady -- yes, definitely unadapted, knowledge wise.
Likely not. Agafia Lykova is not bored, she‘s still not using any of the modern technology and she’s still living like her ancestors lived 500-100 years ago. And she was young when her family was discovered.
In this case, though, she might agree with me, I'd say -- in that she spends part of her time reading and constructing things, from the article you linked: "reading and construction".
Modern tech? I think there's lots of cool not-modern tech, ancient tech.
Edit: She's an amazingly cool person! Thanks for linking the article, I might have a closer look at her & her life (now done. I wonder how many books she has to read, and after how long she's forgotten them so she can re-read)
Edit2: Sorry if my first version of this post sounded a bit grumpy. Now edited
Success in education is correlated with high IQ. Much the same way high IQ is correlated with many forms of success.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29911926/
…Whatever that means. It's meaningless to say fluid intelligence can't be improved with education, that's a tautology.
https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-do...
>Luckily, there is much more to a brain when you look at it under a microscope, and most neuroscientists now believe that the complexity of cellular and molecular organization of neural connections, or synapses, is what truly determines a brain’s computational capacity. This view is supported by findings that intelligence is more correlated with frontal lobe volume and volume of gray matter, which is dense in neural cell bodies and synapses, than sheer brain size. Other research comparing proteins at synapses between different species suggests that what makes up synapses at the molecular level has had a huge impact on intelligence throughout evolutionary history. So, although having a big brain is somewhat predictive of having big smarts, intelligence probably depends much more on how efficiently different parts of your brain communicate with each other.
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Brains consume a lot of resources, so evolution had to optimize their efficiency. They need energy, they need cooling, they need removal of waste, they must deliver signals faster - all those things are pushing for miniaturization.
Processors in 2000 were ~42nm in size, now they’re ~5nm in size. Not only did they get faster as they grew smaller, they became more efficient as well.
https://www.technotification.com/2021/06/what-is-nm-in-proce...
Evolution of our species continues and some changes in our anatomy are being observed even in the last 100 years of our history. The evolutionary pressure never stopped, it just changed its form. We are no longer competing with nature, we are competing with ourselves, adjusting our diet, exposure to seasonal weather, sun and fresh air, physical activities and mental challenges. I would say yes, we may have become more intelligent, even if we lost our connection to nature. We just use our intelligence for different things: our society, our language are much more sophisticated, our abstract thinking and creativity have advanced, some of us may have got more control over our bodies (I’m pretty sure modern athletes are more developed than our ancestors).