Could someone please clarify this?

The most simple explanation is that people have never changed, only the mediums by which we express ourselves.

Yeah. People who lived before us also liked to laugh and have a good time. Wow, what a concept right.

They also were neither dumber nor more intelligent than us today they just worked on less / different information.

Apparently there was never a human sapien found that we confidently can say that they were smarter or dumber. Our intelligence level has always been the same. Inb4 someone comes with an IQ list showing we got smarter; no we aren’t. We just got better at making iQ tests.

The only thing I could confidently say is most people get better nutrition on average so have better development in childhood. Same reason we’re a bit taller now. But that just means the poor are smarter than they used to be, not everyone.

Also the reduction of parasites has made a big difference on our effective nutrition as children when development is key. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10994709/ I imagine as we have used heavy metals like lead, off and on through history it has made significant impacts on intelligence throughout those times.

Good point, in even just the last 40 years we’ve stopped using lead paint. A hundred years ago we had arsenic in wallpaper. The food standards were absolutely abysmal, and refrigeration wasn’t a thing. The past was wild.

Is that why there’s a huge population of Americans 40+ who vote against their own best interests? (I may be down voted to hell for this, but with as much empathy as I can find, I simply do not understand it, and it makes me lose hope for the human race. If it was as something as simple as lead paint, whose impact will slowly fade as populations age, it would at least give a more valid reason that people seem to lack critical thinking skills in the age of misinformation)

I put that down to the insane amount of fake ads on Facebook that they allowed and the lies that fox news have been legally allowed to make for over a decade due to freedom of speech. I’m not saying freedom of speech is generally bad, I’m just saying that’s how they successfully argued the news lying is fine. There are many many more right wing grift media outlets now. And people that soak it up think everyone else is brainwashed.

We’ve only exchanged the bad stuff to other bad stuff. Now we have PFAS, microplastics, pesticides, growth hormones, and all kinds of crap in our bodies and our food.

Our bodies are wonders and can keep cancer at bay for so long, but I agree these things will catch up with us. I wonder if there is/was a tipping point where the increased effective nutrition will be overshadowed by these other poisons and we will grow shorter and be less intellectually capable again.

>Inb4 someone comes with an IQ list showing we got smarter; no we aren’t. We just got better at making iQ tests. We are making iq tests harder so that mean remains 100. What exactly do you mean by us making “better” iq tests? The average person today is going to be way better at taking iq tests than the average person from the time when the average person couldn’t read. And I would say that does represent that people today are more intelligent than in the past. But this increase in intelligence is not in capacity, but in rising the floor with education. There are nations where iq is lower and people are less intelligent, but the children of those people who are raised in a nation with higher average iq, have iqs representative of the nation with higher average iq.

Not being able to read doesn’t mean you lack the capacity or intelligence to do so, though.

Lack of childhood education has permanent consequences on ones intelligence. At the most drastic level a person who has not been exposed to language growing up will never be able to learn to speak as an adult. While a year of education represents an increase of about 1 to 5 iq points. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6088505/?utm_source=chatgpt.com#section22-0956797618774253 Someone like Aristotle would probably score very high on a modern iq test, while the average person of the time would be significantly below average even if they learned how to read and write. The capacity was there, but they missed the window of opportunity to reach the peak of that capacity.

You argue with the assumption that IQ accurately measures intelligence, which it does not. It’s a highly flawed, culturally biased system that was developed in western contexts. The fact that you can literally train for IQ tests shows it can’t be measuring real intelligence. Take someone from an isolated Amazonian tribe, they’d probably think you’re an idiot for not knowing which plants are medicinal or how to track animals. But they would likely score low on an IQ test, obviously that doesn’t make them less intelligent. It just shows IQ tests only capture certain types of thinking that happen to be valued in Western education systems.

But … it kinda does. What you’re describing is not intelligence, but just passed down knowledge (either by their tribe or by simply observing that plant x killed friend y, do not consume). I can operate a bow. That doesn’t make me intelligent. I agree that IQ tests aren’t a great way to really test one’s intelligence, but the publicly available IQ test also has very little to do with the actual academic science. Those are mainly just for people to “feel good about themselves”. I scored in the 120 to 130 range back then. I’m not confident to say I’m THAT intelligent, allegedly. But there are a lot of tests today that test your ability to make logical conclusions, to abstract knowledge, to infer, even if you’ve never come in contact with something before. Believe it or not, but before we actually wrote down things and applied that knowledge on a wider population, there wasn’t that much progress for a very long time in human development. And even today I will argue to the death that not everyone is equally capable of reaching a certain level of intelligence. Some people are just born smarter than others. There is no way around it. Some people can speak 20 languages fluently and need a calculator for simple math like 76 + 32. Others can solve hardcore equations in their head, but have no idea about economics and can’t get it into their skulls. I’ve seen them all. Not every human is capable of becoming the next Einstein. And that’s okay. But I still believe that the average human in any Western country is more intelligent than some guy from an isolated Amazonian tribe, because they’re “content” with just knowing what they need to know to survive, and seem to have no ambition to learn more about the world or themselves. That by definition makes them less intelligent.

I think you’re confusing intelligence with education. One is inherent and one is learned based on opportunity. The issue with IQ tests is that it is really difficult to test intelligence in a standard way when people’s educational opportunities differ so significantly.

Aristotle wouldn’t even be able to read a modern IQ test.

I can’t read French iq test.

What a condescending way to say people like having fun lol

this mason must’ve been giggling for 50h straight while carving this.

It’s probably the classic “developer snuck sneaky code into program, and nobody noticed until years later”. The only downside here is that at the time this was made things like that might have gotten you deleted… so, maybe it was ordained by God™ 😉

The oldest recorded joke Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap

This statue is actually at Cologne City Hall in Germany. ~~This statue is actually on the outside of the Duomo di Milano / the Milan Cathedral in Italy. Among the cathedral’s thousands of statues, there are quite a few that make you do a double-take, this one’s definitely one of the weirdest.~~ The pose is actually called “anasyrma,” which goes way back to ancient art. It’s basically when a figure exposes themselves in a super dramatic and sometimes hilarious way. In medieval cathedrals, these bizarre or cheeky statues sometimes had a “protective” meaning like scaring away evil but honestly a lot of it was just the stone carvers having a laugh or poking fun at authority. No one really knows exactly why this particular statue was made. Edit: Credit to FnnKnn for the correction : this statue is actually at Cologne City Hall in Germany, not the Milan Cathedral. Thanks for setting the record straight!

Wrong, it’s part of the city hall of cologne: [Autofellatiating grotesque – Konrad von Hochstaden – Cologne City Hall – Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_City_Hall?useskin=vector#/media/File:Autofellatiating_grotesque_-_Konrad_von_Hochstaden.jpg) You can find them on buildings from that time quite frequently though. This r/AskHistorians post digs a bit deeper into the details: [Questions about the statue of Konrad von Hochstaden on the walls of Cologne City Hall : r/AskHistorians](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wv6g5/questions_about_the_statue_of_konrad_von/)

You’re totally right, my memory mixed things up. That statue really is at Cologne City Hall, not in Milan. Thanks so much for pointing it out and sharing the info. Really appreciate the correction!

No worries and tbf (at least to me) all those statues look almost the samd

Man I really thought I was getting hell in a celld just now

So that’s were my ex got his idea from…

Yep. Architect was shitposting.