300,000 years dumb

Shocking new find rewrites our beginnings to now 300,000 years back and casts a whole new perspective on our cognitive growth timeline.

An exciting new discovery has been found at an archaeological site in Morocco that predates our emergence as a species by some 100,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Prior to this discovery the oldest human bones found were 200,000 years old. But these new five individuals found in the Jebel Irhoud site were alongside primitive flint tools and a wide selection of animal fossils that dated this hunter tribe up to 349,000 years old.

Let’s take a moment to consider the implications of this. These skulls look exactly like someone you would see walking around today and yet they were living incredibly primitive lives as cavemen -overlapping other primitive hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.

It’s quite staggering to think that ‘dumb’ humans using primitive tools were wondering around for such vast periods of time. Indeed the fossils do show that they were equipped with a slightly smaller brain, in particular the cerebellum (used for muscle coordination) as confirmed by Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Before now our mental development as a species was already lagging behind our physical development by some 150,000 years. Traces of art only appear 50,000 years back with evidence of agriculture some 8-10,000 years ago. That means our relative intelligence as a technologically capable species took some 250,000 to 290,000 years to to follow suit.

If we are to consider the last 5,000 years the emergence of a clear, sophisticated technological society then only 1.6% of our time on earth as a species has been spent at our current intelligence levels despite looking exactly the same.

So for 98.4% of the time dumber humans have been wondering the earth, living with cognitive means far lower than today even if we did look exactly the same.

And we are still quite dumb even now. Nick Bostrom in his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies’ makes the valid point:

‘Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are better thought as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization.’

‘Progress along the biological path is clearly feasible.’

Selective breeding, cyborgism and genetic engineering all have the potential to elevate us to mild forms of superintelligence.

As does collective intelligence through networking when we finally harness the internet from the primitive chaos it is in today ‘with better support for deliberation, debiasing, judgement aggregation not forgetting enhancement from artificial intelligence.’

Whilst it’s true to say we are at the first rung on the ladder, our tools are becoming vastly sophisticated as we climb up the cognition scale in the coming decades.