If you look around, it appears we humans are at the top of our game, what with our ability to swim faster than the fishes, fly higher than the birds and separate ourselves almost entirely from the natural world that spawned us, but Stanford’s Gerald Crabtree believes we’ve been on the decline since before our ancestors left Africa…two million years ago.
“The development of our intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal, dispersed groups of peoples before our ancestors emerged from Africa,” Crabtree said in a press release...
“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas and a clear-sighted view of important issues,” Crabtree said in his paper, according to The Independent.
Naturally, such claims are generating their fair share of controversy, but as Wency Leung at The Globe and Mail points out, perhaps the very technology we point to as proof of our buff brains could just as well be our downfall.
Full story at The Independent via The Globe and Mail.
Controversial science.
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