Big Question Of The Day: Are Humans More Intelligent Now Or 5000 Years Ago ?
I woke up today and of course the biggest story was that the dumbass ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal and shut down global trade for like a week was finally freed and moving along the way it should. Rejoice. The pictures made me stop and think and realize how stupid I truly am. I mean look at this thing
I do NOT understand NOR accept that a thing like this should even be possible. Like how can you look at that thing and decide in your brain "yeah, that will be able to float and travel thousands upon thousands of miles with no issues. It's a miracle there's not thousands of boats like that at the bottom of the ocean every single day. And yet somehow, someone invented boats. I remember in 3rd grade they had use make little model boats/canoes out of clay and toothpicks. Every kid in the class made their boat with careful instruction so that it would be able to float and do you know what happened? Every last boat fucking sank because of course it did because buoyancy makes ZERO sense. Yet all throughout the course of time people have been getting on these things that are as big as hotels and sailing all over the world for months or years at a time without so much as a map. What'd they use for maps...the sky. Have you ever been lost before in a foreign place? NYC is a perfect example. If you aren't familiar with the grid system that New York has then it is impossible to orient yourself and find your way because everything looks the same for the most part. It's not like Chicago or Denver or Los Angeles were you can always use giant bodies of water or the mountains as your fixed position. You know what looks even more of the same than NYC...billions of square miles of open ocean. I did a float tank one time and when the light flipped on I wouldn't be able to tell you which way was up.
This is a long rant that makes me think that the average person 5000 years ago was probably WAY smarter than we are today. I know, I know, I know. Literacy rate is up. Technology is improving so rapidly we can't keep up. We definitely know more stuff now, but there is no way we are more intelligent than we used to be. I put it to a poll and once again I am with the minority.
Now, two people have popped up in my mentions about this stream of consciousness. Donnie is my favorite person to discuss old shit with because he's super into it too
That is a long time, but there was only a way to write things down for like the last 5000 years or so. That means that all of this wisdom was just passed down orally for the entirety of the species. I couldn't tell you how to make my chili even though its fucking bomb and I've made it 1000 times, but the Mayans could tell you what the sky looked like 60,000 years ago and could predict astronomical events thousands of years into the future. There is NO WAY people should be able to figure that out or even if they did, pass down that knowledge or prove that knowledge. There was no scientists back then. There are barely any scientists now and even scientists can't think scientifically about EVERYTHING around them the way it seems like ancient people did.
There were responses like this one
Didn't have anything to do? Dude…how about being all encompassed with not dying. Imagine living in a world where you were under constant threat of death. Winter is coming. You know why winter is scary…because back in the day it would fucking kill you. The cold. The lack of resources. The isolation. The need for shelter, fire, and nutrients to stave off disease that would also kill you. Or…how about your neighbor. That guy looks in through your teepee window and sees you staying warm by the fire eating some beans that you picked and muskrat meat that you saved while you're next to your wife and the next thing you know there is rock being thrown through your face.
We need to figure out what to eat. Which is no small challenge. Ask anyone who has had a girlfriend about the frustration that comes from scrolling through 5 different delivery apps for hours on end and throwing out suggestions for dinner after she said "whatever you feel like having" and then every suggestion is met with a "eh, no, I don't want that". That is one of the most difficult things modern man is asked to do. Not saying it's not hard. However, it's nowhere near as hard as trying to figure out how to eat. Finding dry wood, walking around looking for the types of plants that won't kill you, digging up those plants, and then if you're lucky you figured out how to kill some stupid animal with a sharpened stick. They did all of that without adderral or xanax. They must have been so fucking stressed all the time. And yet…they figured out the circumference of the Earth when they weren't too busy figuring out how not to die
We definitely know more stuff now. We can definitely do more stuff. I don't think anyone born in modern times would survive 5000 years ago. Ancient people weren't stupid just because they couldn't read. They were just pre-literate. I don't know what the answer to the original question of this blog is. Something tells me that ancient people were way better at critical/creative thinking because they had to be. It was a survival skill. Where now all we have to do is pull up our phones to answer any problem we might have. Like, for example, how to get a giant ship out of a small canal. They probably just had to google the physics and shit and then bring in enough tug boats to supply enough thrust to move the boat back into buoyancy. Or something. I don't know because I am a modern moron.