> Human intelligence has remained approximately the same for 50,000 years. The ancient world had its geniuses at the same rate as the modern world.
No, they didn't. Human genetic intelligence may be the same (although this is doubtful because as ancient genomes slowly become available for analysis, we see ever more signs of huge numbers of frequencies changing in soft selection sweeps when we go back only a few thousand years in Europe, so 50k years...?), but the environments are not nearly the same. The ancient world was absolutely grindingly dirt-poor compared to the modern world, and the negative environmental accordingly huge. (Even things like sanitation may not have made a difference: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/ancient-ro... )
The most comparable places to the ancient world right now would be somewhere like subsaharan Africa, where between the subsistence agriculture, parasites, poverty, and whatnot, despite the benefits of widespread literacy and vaccines, the average IQ is still quite low, somewhere around IQ 80, or at least 1 standard deviation below the West; with genius at a cutoff of IQ 140 or so, that implies a rate of geniuses much less than 1/8th the Western rate.
So no, the rate isn't going to be nearly the same. I would note that it's probably not an accident that when we think of geniuses of antiquity, we tend to think of people drawn from the urban elite of the capital city of empires at their peak (eg Athens, Rome)...
Ancient Athens, at its peak, had a total population of less than 300,000 people. They represented the urban elite of an empire of a few million people at best. I think it would be difficult to find any comparably-sized contemporary population with a remotely similar genius per capita ratio.
While all that is certainly true there were likely at least some advantages to ancient thinkers which we don't enjoy today.
If one was an elite a bunch of tasks that take up our modern time were taken care of via slavery. No thinking about bills and filling tax forms. No thinking about resumes. No job search. No washing the dishes. No worrying about parking the car and the apartment lease.
There were less distraction in general. No computers, very few (if any) books. The body of knowledge was very small. You could learn about pretty much everything that was known if were in the right situation. Today I can't even keep up with a small percentage of JavaScript frameworks much less everything else. At that point one could maybe really drill down and specialize and focus for long periods of time. Of course you did have disease and sore teeth and probably a short lifespan to contend with... but there were likely some advantages as far as flat out "thinking" goes.
Well, yes, but in Athens there was compulsory military service--Socrates's interlocutor from The Sophist returns in a dying state from a siege, which causes the narrator to remember the dialogue--there could be service in the courts as juror or judge, or other government service. I suspect that anyone looking for distraction in Athens found it.
You certainly touch on a lot of sensitive topics in this post.
It is an extremely interesting question if the potential genetic intelligence of ancient populations is less than modern populations, but it is not a question you would be wise to study if you want a quiet life.
'Prosper'!='exist'. He claimed they existed. They did not, barring ancient people being some sort of bizarre near-super-human race which can laugh off protein and iodine deficiencies and parasite loads and early-childhood infections in a way modern people can only dream of.
This is the same problem you see when people solemnly pontificate about how many Einsteins are trapped in Africa/India and if only we would fund One Laptop Per Child we could unlock their potential...
No, they didn't. Human genetic intelligence may be the same (although this is doubtful because as ancient genomes slowly become available for analysis, we see ever more signs of huge numbers of frequencies changing in soft selection sweeps when we go back only a few thousand years in Europe, so 50k years...?), but the environments are not nearly the same. The ancient world was absolutely grindingly dirt-poor compared to the modern world, and the negative environmental accordingly huge. (Even things like sanitation may not have made a difference: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/ancient-ro... )
The most comparable places to the ancient world right now would be somewhere like subsaharan Africa, where between the subsistence agriculture, parasites, poverty, and whatnot, despite the benefits of widespread literacy and vaccines, the average IQ is still quite low, somewhere around IQ 80, or at least 1 standard deviation below the West; with genius at a cutoff of IQ 140 or so, that implies a rate of geniuses much less than 1/8th the Western rate.
So no, the rate isn't going to be nearly the same. I would note that it's probably not an accident that when we think of geniuses of antiquity, we tend to think of people drawn from the urban elite of the capital city of empires at their peak (eg Athens, Rome)...