Having large mammals available to domesticate, who can provide fertiliser and traction (pulling ploughs and harrows) certainly makes things easier, but doesn’t seem to have been a large factor in the timing of the rise of civilisation, or particularly dependent upon the IQ of the human species.
How would we test this? If human IQ matters, it seems like we would need some animal which is in contact with low-IQ humans and higher IQ humans, which the first couldn’t tame but the second could. You already link to an example of recent man domesticating the fox, and there’s quite a bit of European zebra-taming, though fully domesticating a species takes generations to breed out deleterious traits. The example of deer seems like weak support as well; some strains were somewhat domesticated by northern peoples, but that evidence is only weak to me because it’s not clear the economic value of deer was the same across climates.
And it has nothing to do with the brain.
which is a fatty acid required for human brain development.
Er… what?
It seems to me that most IQ-related alleles are “build the brain this way,” and so a gene that creates a necessary acid out of whatever you have lying around seems like it’s an IQ-related allele. Among those with sufficient diets, there will be no effect, but among those with deficient diets, there will be a positive effect; unless the entire population has sufficient diets, that’ll lead to a positive correlation.
If you’re making the claim that “processing speed is not the only factor,” then sure! The best example of that is neanderthals, who probably were around as good (if not better) at abstract problem-solving, foresight, tool-making, and so on, but contributed only a small percentage of genes to current humans. It’s not certain why that’s the case yet, but a strong partial explanation is they didn’t have trade networks, and so were making the best of local materials while their competitors were able to use superior materials acquired from far away. Another good example is that developed, large civilizations moved northward with agriculture, even though there’s strong evidence that IQs are higher among groups that spent significant timescales in colder (i.e. more northern) climates).
But it seems really odd to me to claim that if you dropped current humans into the world at the start of the previous interglacial period with no extral capital besides their genes, you would expect them to take twelve thousand years to reach the state of development we’re at now. They’ve already got neat things like lactase persistence (developed 5-10k years ago), and while their adapations to modern society might be a handicap during their hunter-gatherer phase, supposing they survive it should speed up the progress of their civilization afterward.
I’ll have to check my original source for that when I get home; I was under the impression it was because their forebrains were larger, but looking now I’m primarily finding claims that their whole brains were larger (which, given their larger body size, doesn’t mean all that much).
This looks like the closest thing in the relevant wiki article to my claim:
The quality of tools found at archaeological sites is further said to suggest that Neanderthals were good at “expert” cognition, a form of observational learning and practice acquired through apprenticeship that relies heavily on long-term procedural memory.
but it’s also tempered by things that might be evidence the other way. (Neanderthal tools changed little in thousands of years- is that because they found the local optimum early, or because they were bad at innovating?)
[edit] This argument wasn’t in the book I thought it was in, so I’m slightly less confident in it. I think there’s strong evidence that the primary differential between neanderthals and their successors was social, not mental processing speed / memory / etc., and will edit the grandparent to reflect that.
How would we test this? If human IQ matters, it seems like we would need some animal which is in contact with low-IQ humans and higher IQ humans, which the first couldn’t tame but the second could. You already link to an example of recent man domesticating the fox, and there’s quite a bit of European zebra-taming, though fully domesticating a species takes generations to breed out deleterious traits. The example of deer seems like weak support as well; some strains were somewhat domesticated by northern peoples, but that evidence is only weak to me because it’s not clear the economic value of deer was the same across climates.
Er… what?
It seems to me that most IQ-related alleles are “build the brain this way,” and so a gene that creates a necessary acid out of whatever you have lying around seems like it’s an IQ-related allele. Among those with sufficient diets, there will be no effect, but among those with deficient diets, there will be a positive effect; unless the entire population has sufficient diets, that’ll lead to a positive correlation.
If you’re making the claim that “processing speed is not the only factor,” then sure! The best example of that is neanderthals, who probably were around as good (if not better) at abstract problem-solving, foresight, tool-making, and so on, but contributed only a small percentage of genes to current humans. It’s not certain why that’s the case yet, but a strong partial explanation is they didn’t have trade networks, and so were making the best of local materials while their competitors were able to use superior materials acquired from far away. Another good example is that developed, large civilizations moved northward with agriculture, even though there’s strong evidence that IQs are higher among groups that spent significant timescales in colder (i.e. more northern) climates).
But it seems really odd to me to claim that if you dropped current humans into the world at the start of the previous interglacial period with no extral capital besides their genes, you would expect them to take twelve thousand years to reach the state of development we’re at now. They’ve already got neat things like lactase persistence (developed 5-10k years ago), and while their adapations to modern society might be a handicap during their hunter-gatherer phase, supposing they survive it should speed up the progress of their civilization afterward.
What evidence do we have for this?
I’ll have to check my original source for that when I get home; I was under the impression it was because their forebrains were larger, but looking now I’m primarily finding claims that their whole brains were larger (which, given their larger body size, doesn’t mean all that much).
This looks like the closest thing in the relevant wiki article to my claim:
but it’s also tempered by things that might be evidence the other way. (Neanderthal tools changed little in thousands of years- is that because they found the local optimum early, or because they were bad at innovating?)
[edit] This argument wasn’t in the book I thought it was in, so I’m slightly less confident in it. I think there’s strong evidence that the primary differential between neanderthals and their successors was social, not mental processing speed / memory / etc., and will edit the grandparent to reflect that.