The African Origins of Human Intelligence

Humans commonly make the perceptual error of equating the knowledge products of a society with the individual intellectual capacities of that society's members, but this assumption has legs and feet of very soft clay. Sure, knowledge tends to be produced by smart people in any particular society, but the concentration of energy a society can place on knowledge production relies in every sense on that society's mode of production, largely agricultural viability. Agriculture emerges as a result of climate, endemic species, and other ecological factors, not brain power. In short, civilization and its material and intellectual products are not an indication of a single group's intellectual capacity. They are based on geographic luck and the fickle course of history.