Your typical adult from 1900 was pretty dumb, by today’s standards. Yank one off the street and run them through a modern standardised intelligence test like Raven’s Progressive Matrices or a Wechsler Intelligence Scale and they’d probably score an IQ of about 70. Given that the median score in these tests today is 100, and an IQ of 70 is often regarded as a sign of intellectual disability, that bodes ill for our recent ancestors.
It seems that we’re a lot smarter today than we were i...
