Were humans as intelligent 1000 years ago?

Question

The Romans and The Anglo-Saxons++++

Were they as intelligent as modern homo sapiens?

Answer 1

yes

Answer 2

Wouldn't it be a little more accurate to ask if we were as stupid 1,000 years ago?

Answer 3

Excuse me? They WERE modern homo sapiens. And they had to have been more intelligent than we, since they were not as spoiled by technology and had to exercise their wits more than the residents of today's industrialized societies.

By the way, uneducated does not mean ignorant. What they didn't learn in schools they learned in the university of life. Literacy is a marker of education, not intelligence. I would be willing to bet that our ancestors were using a greater percentage of their brain cells than we are today, simply because more was demanded of them.

Answer 4

I feel certain that you could take a group of babies born 1000 years ago - whisk them into the present day - raise them in a good educational system - and they would be just as intelligent as any group of kids born today.  The evolutionary clock ticks slowly.   1000 years is nothing in human evolution.  Of course there would be some smarter than others just as we see in students today.

This is a good question.  I talk about this in my classes.  Of course we can only give opinions since there is no way to prove this, but consider what was written by Plato almost 2400 years ago.  Consider the engineering that went into monumental constructions like the pyramids.  Consider men like Leonardo Da Vinci - women like Hildegard of Bingen.  Many other examples exist of remarkably intelligent men and women in the past several thousand years. [ Women had it particularly tough since they have not been given equal opportunities educationally until the current era.]

Added note - I like Mark's answer below.  Good questions like this generate good answers.

Answer 5

Of course.  They WERE "modern homo sapiens".  But education was much less available 1,000 years ago, limited mostly to priests and other Church men, merchants (who needed to know how to read, write and do arithmetic to keep accounts), and a few others.  Ordinary people (peasants) and many of the nobility as well, were illiterate.  

People 1,000 years ago didn't know very much about science and had very little technology, and most ordinary people never traveled more than a few miles from the village where they were born and raised, so they didn't know very much about geography or history outside of their own immediate region and their own family.

But they weren't unintelligent, just ignorant and uneducated.

Answer 6

Clearly, No.

There is excellent experimental evidence that now exists that demonstrates that we are becoming more intelligent and that society's changes are responsible for that.

This is because intelligence is not something that is JUST determined by genetics.  Intelligence is a skill that can be developed, honed, and improved by the proper social environment.  Of course there are genetic components to intelligence.  That has also been shown.  Otherwise a dog would be just as intelligent as a human.  Well, maybe some are.  LOL!

A good basic verification of this is the rare cases of feral children that occur that lose the ability to have vocabularies of more than about 400 words max. if they are found and educated after they reach puberty.  Apparently the brain has a natural pruning process that occurs around puberty that eliminates those neurons that have not been used, permanently dumbing the person down.   This is why school education is so very important.

It is hard to imagine that a child living even 1,000 years ago would score as well on an IQ test even if adapted for their limited world, simply because they had far less opportunities to learn and use their brains and their vocabularies were primitive compared to today's youth.

Answer 7

Sure. You should read about their cultures.  They had laws, literature, and architecture.  They were in fact modern homo sapiens.  

Answer 8

yes. But their scientific knowledge was lower than now.

Not to believe in god was impossible at that time. They could not know age of universe and neither know about fossils. The distance between stars was strongly underestimated. They did no nothing about bacteria and viruses. So, difficult to compare

Answer 9

You comparing two very different eras, but OK I guess they were as intelligent for their time and their culture.

Back then the rules were very different, hunting, gathering, pillaging, raping very different all together, probably more fun too.

YES

Answer 10

Consider the precise alignment of the pyramids. The temples in the Yucatan that show the Summer solstice and the winter solstice precisely, even now. The many inventions - we have modified and improved them, but the principle they discovered is the same.

Even well before 1000 years ago, man had to be intelligent enough to survive  when he was not as strong, not as fast or as large as the animals he hunted to survive.  We survived by our smarts, not our strength or size.

Answer 11

For the times that they lived in, I would say they were smarter than us.  But your question has way to many variables to accurately answer.

Answer 12

Yes.  I don't think human intelligence has changed much over time.  We know more nowadays, at least we have more knowledge about science, medicine, technology ect, though we probably fall far short of our ancestors when it comes to practical skills.  They lived in an age when self-sufficency was the norm rather than a fad, and had to known had to do an enormous number of things that we don't have to do now.

I, for instance, as a housewife would be expected to know all about preserving food (very little fresh food in winter) rearing poultry, milking cows, making butter and cheese, brewing ale, preparing and spinning flax and wool, weaving, and making home remedies and nursing the sick, even setting broken bones.  If I was stuck down in Anglo-Saxon England I'd be completely helpless.

Answer 13

Actually, if you took a child from our modern era and deny it an education and access to modern conveniences, it will be dumber than a common barbarian of the Roman era.  

Technology is something we start learning about at birth when we get that first mobile hanging over our crib or first fall asleep to the vibration of the car.  If you took a baby from the Roman era and began raising it alongside a modern baby, they would develop at the same rate and with the same intelligence (except for what's governed by genes).

Answer 14

Yes ! ..... Look at the things we do today and all of it is

Copy's from a system, developed and invented back then!

Life is natural progression, so it is natural for us to improve

on the original .  But by the same argument, there is many

things like the pyramids and so forth which modern man

cannot truly copy.  Drainage was another invention, but in

this instance man has improved greatly in its design and

functionality of this invention.