Stone me! Spears show early human species was sharper than we thought
Evidence of hunting with spears 500,000 years ago suggests common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals was ‘very bright’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/nov/15/stone-spear-early-human-species
People way too often equate ‘things’ with intelligence. How many of us, if plunked down in the middle of a jungle (or wherever) have the means to survive long enough to get rescued, let alone survive indefinitely, find a mate, raise a family, etc.? I bet the answer to that is ‘a very tiny number, statistically equal to zero”. I have studied survival tactics quite a bit over my life (am a big fan of Survivorman, though I expect he would also tell you that surviving is _way_ different from thriving) and I know that, unless you are lucky enough to be stranded in a place with plentiful food (which also tend to be places where there are a crap load of predators!), you will be spending nearly all your time producing enough food to keep from starving to death, and be hard pressed to produce enough to carry you through winter. Next year, presuming you survive, you get to start that process all over again! Modern farming/ranching/fishing is so incredibly efficient that 99%+ of our population no longer has to engage in food production or preservation (no, shopping at the grocery store is NOT the same!). Even those who engage in food production tend to be so highly specialized that they likely would die of malnutrition if they had to depend on themselves. That ‘ancient’ humans were smart enough to produce weapons like spears isn’t surprising or shocking to me, our intelligence didn’t spring out of a single mutation (or wave of God’s hand), it was something that slowly, incrementally grew over 10’s of thousands of generations (and millions of years). Take a baby Homo heidelbergensis and raise them in a (normal, healthy, stable) household today and I doubt that beyond genetic analysis and perhaps their bit more rugged physique (but then again, they might just look like a footballer), no one would know a thing. They would speak the same, have the same IQ (on average, of course, so were this a real experiment we could carry out, we would want to replicate this 100’s of times), etc. Our ancestors were no dummies, quite the contrary; I expect they were, on average, a lot more intelligent than we are and were _certainly_ more perceptive (you don’t pay attention to your surroundings, you die! No walking and texting for them!).
What is ironic to me is that the very success of our super intelligent ancestors is what has allowed our species to degenerate into a bunch of useless boobs who text themselves to death because they can’t be bothered with paying attention. It is that success that lead to the technological explosion that has allowed the incredible survival of the individual members of our species (except when we kill one another, but then again, we very quickly fill in the missing gap, so in as little as a generation we have surpassed the original population). Big families were the norm up until a few generations ago because you needed to produce a dozen babies to expect to carry on your genes through the next generation.
It may be that sudden, unexpected living “off the grid” will outweigh the birthrate problems you put forth in the other post.