Comment by sokoloff
6 hours ago
If the measured cognitive abilities of a typical 2000-era Homo sapiens are statistically significantly different from 1900-era Homo sapiens, to me that casts some doubt as to how likely similar a 125K years ago and since out-competed species was.
Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?
(This is obviously an unpopular line of inquiry/source of confusion based on the voting.)
> Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?
It kind of was, and one of the people you can thank for that is Norman Borlaug.
>Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?
I mean if you look at the rate of technology change and population growth, ya probably.
What we cannot compare is if the older species could assimilate all the information that we had to in that period. The vast wealth of knowledge of the human super-species wasn't avaliable then.
For one literacy right now is ~100% and has never been anywhere close to that until 50-60 years ago.
Literacy.
Percentage of children to survive to adulthood.
Global food surplus.
The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...