In honor of Halloween eve, I thought I’d show an eerie clip from one of my favorite movies of all time (2001: A Space Odyssey):

What I love about this scene is just the haunting beauty of life before proto-humans evolved higher intelligence.  Even though the scene is very violent, there’s just something extremely peaceful about it:  For millions of years, generations of African apes would just lived there simple repetitive pointless lives under the quiet glare of the rising and setting sun, and then died, allowing their kids to repeat the same pointless cycle.

The film implies it took an alien intervention for apes to evolves into humans, which as former commenter “Race Realist” has noted, is a common conspiracy theory, perhaps because the human mind is such a complex entity that it’s hard for people to imagine how a process as random as natural selection could have produced it.

Indeed commenter “Mug of Pee” often cites the failure to beat Secretariat’s records as an example of how  even artificial selection for relatively simple traits like horse racing speed eventually hits a brick wall where natural selection runs out of mutations to exploit.  This may explain not only Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory, but the hundreds of thousands of years in the fossil record where the genus homo showed no progress in tool making and it’s also an argument HBD deniers like commenter “Swank” have used to argue all races must have equal intelligence, at least at the high end, because intelligence is so complex that any mutation that would increase its upper limit would take hundreds of thousands of years to appear.  This in sharp contrast to scholars like Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending who argued Ashkenazi Jews were selected for high IQ mutations that emerged only about a thousand years ago.

Even though the theme of aliens intervening in human evolution sounds kind of cheesy, it’s handled deftly by director Stanley Kubrick, who never shows us the aliens, instead focusing on the featureless black monolith that mysteriously enhances the IQ of the apes who touch it.

Some claim Kubrick, who was Ashkenazi Jewish, had an IQ of 200, and even assuming the old age ratio IQ scale that gave ridiculously inflated results, this is probably a huge exaggeration.  Nonetheless, he may have been the smartest major director of his generation so it’s interesting to note that like “America’s smartest man” Chris Langan,  he’s quite interested in a scientific definition of “God”, and that’s what the aliens were meant to be in his film.

A few hours ago I noticed an explosion of traffic on my blog and rushed to twitter to see where it was coming from.  It seems one of the most influential people on the planet had recently commented on a blog article I wrote.

A man who co-authored the most famous IQ book of all time (The Bell Curve) and whose 1984 book Losing Ground revolutionized U.S. social policy. What a great honor it is to have the man who Bill Kristol called America’s leading living social scientist commenting on my blog.

So everyone please be on your best behavior.  You never know who’s reading.

One reason people think the black-white IQ gap is at least partly genetic is its durability over time.  The roughly one standard deviation IQ gap (15 points) between blacks and whites living for centuries in the United States was first observed in World War I during a time of extreme racism.  It was thought that after decades of racial progress in civil rights, the IQ gap might diminish,  but the most recent high quality IQ data shows the adult racial gap remains over 15 points  (though the gap has narrowed to 12 points in children).

As Arthur Jensen noted, what makes the consistency of the U.S. black-white IQ gap especially striking is that it has endured over a period of such extreme environmental chance that the entire U.S. population is now performing as much as two standard deviations higher on IQ tests because of some combination of increased schooling and media making folks more test savvy,  and increased health and nutrition causing brain size and function to improve.  So even though Americans of all races today score some 30 points higher than their great grandparents in WWI,  the U.S. gap between blacks and whites adults is still 15 points!

Of course one could argue that even a century of IQ gaps proves little, because even though the environment for black Americans has improved dramatically since WWI, they continue to lag way behind white Americans on most measures of socio-economic well-being.

What is needed is data going back much further in time and space.  Obviously, we can’t get in a time machine and return to the paleolithic to give IQ tests to the ancestors of today’s blacks and whites, but what we can do is check the archeological record for evidence of prehistoric intelligence.

On page 134 of his landmark 2007 book Understanding Human History, Princeton astrophysicist Michael Hart documents some of the greatest achievements of the Upper Paleolithic.

Hart notes that with the exception of pottery, all of these inventions were made by people dwelling in Europe.

On page 135 he writes:

None were made by Negroids,  nor by any other group living in tropical regions.

These facts are consistent with–and most easily explained by–the hypothesis that the groups that were living in cold climates had already evolved higher intelligence by 40 kya…

Critics dismiss IQ as just a score on a silly little test with no relevance to real world intelligence, however if racial differences in IQ predict real world creativity tens of thousands of years ago,  this suggests the tests are measuring differences that are very real, very important, and very genetic and ancient in origin.

One problem with Hart’s book is that he credits the bow and arrow to Europeans.  As commenter Jm8 likes to remind us, archaeologists working at South Africa’s Pinnacle Point cave site found evidence that humans had already invented the bow and arrow 71,000 years ago, likely before the major races had diverged.  However preeminent paleoanthropologist Richard G Klein finds the evidence for this unconvincing (see the 28:06 mark in this video).

Another problem is Hart’s exclusion of the Ishango bone from his list of important paleolithic inventions, as some believe this 20,000 year old African object preserves the earliest known example of math, however skeptics believe the notches on the bone “may in fact be meaningless, simply scratched in to create a better gripping surface.”

What sets humans apart from the great apes? The ability to survive the cold.

Humans are an African primate.  Darwin inferred that Africa was the cradle of mankind because it was the land of our closest relatives: the great apes.  All living hominoids, including us, evolved in the tropics, and with the exception of modern humans, no living hominoid is capable of surviving the cold. Gorillas, bonobos and chimps all live in Africa and orangutans, gibbons and siamangs live in southeast Asia.

Apes first appear in the fossil record 25 million years ago in sub-Saharan Africa, so the hominoid body has had tens of millions of years to become perfectly, exquisitely, well-suited  to tropical life, so any hominoid that dared to leave Africa and face the bitter cold of the ice age, needed to be incredibly adaptable to survive an environment so opposite of what his ancestors spent 25 million years specializing in.  It’s likely that such rapid adaptation could not occur until the hominoid brain reached a certain size, giving us a high capacity to learn, invent, and create culture.

This was the transition from ape to man.  Indeed the ability to survive the freezing cold seems to be what separates humans from the apes.  For centuries people have speculated about a giant bipedal ape surviving in the Pacific Northwest,  but the fact that sasquatch is just a myth further shows that apes can’t survive the cold.

When in our evolutionary history did we become smart enough to do so?

“Humans” first entered Europe 1.8 million years ago, but there’s no evidence we were smart enough to survive Northern Europe until 780,000 years ago,  when the climate was similar to today’s southern Scandinavia, and it’s only within the last 40,000 years that humans have proved able to survive the arctic.

Of course even once humans evolved the intelligence to survive the cold,  some could survive it more efficiently than others, and as commenters MeLo and Phil78 have pointed out, competition may have been the decisive variable.  But competition may have been especially intense precisely because it was cold and thus there were fewer natural resources, while in the tropics, selection pressures were more relaxed because there was less need for shelter and more food to go around.

A 2010 article in the guardian describes archaeologist Brian Fagan’s view that Neanderthals lacked the cognitive ability to adapt to the cold as creatively as modern humans:

This meant, says Fagan, that we learned to use local materials – antler, bone and ivory – in ways Neanderthals simply could not imagine. In one case, this resulted in “one of the most revolutionary inventions in history: the eyed needle, fashioned from a sliver of bone or ivory,” he adds. While Neanderthals shivered in rags in winter, humans used vegetable fibres and needles – created by using stone awls – to make close-fitting, layered clothing and parkas: the survival of the snuggest, in short..

In 2012, paleoanthropologist Rick Potts said:

Whenever glacial habitats invaded Europe and Asia, it appears that the Neanderthals moved south, into Iberia and the Italian peninsula, to take advantage of the warmer places. Overall, their bodies show evidence of cold adaptation. Yet during one cold period, when the Neanderthals retreated, populations of Homo sapiens began to infiltrate the cold regions. How could they do this, especially since these populations were dispersing from tropical Africa? The difference is that these early populations of our species had developed the ability to invent new tools, like sewing needles that were useful in producing warm, body-hugging clothing.

In a 2013 article in the BBC, Oxford university professor Robin Dunbar is quoted as saying the following about Neanderthals:

They were very, very smart, but not quite in the same league as Homo Sapiens. That difference might have been enough to tip the balance when things were beginning to get tough at the end of the last ice age

In 2014 paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London told National Geographic how much harder it was for humans to survive in freezing Eurasia compared to warm Africa:

If temperatures drop 5-10 degrees in Africa, you’re not going to die; there may be changes in rainfall and desert and forest and so forth, but that temperature drop probably won’t kill you.

It’s very likely these Neanderthals, although able to interbreed with humans, and probably capable of speech, will be on average considerably less intelligent than humans. If I had to guess I would suppose their average adult IQ to be about 70, or -2 SD relative to modern humans. You might wonder how they could have survived for 300k+ years with such modest intelligence, but based on my experiences with 5-10 year old kids I don’t think that a sub-adult level of maximum intelligence precludes the ability to form societies and function as hunter-gatherers. (Apes survive with even less cognitive ability.) I just don’t think that higher developments (e.g., invention of writing) are likely for such a population. What Homo Sapiens accomplished in 50-100k years far outstrips Neanderthal accomplishments over a much longer period of time.

I find this comment very confusing, because why is he comparing what Homo Sapiens have accomplished in 50-100K years to what Neanderthals have accomplished “over a much longer period of time”?  Shouldn’t he be comparing what the two species accomplished at the same time?

All the higher developments Hsu speaks of (i.e. invention of writing) didn’t occur until about 35,000 years after Neanderthals went extinct and even “advances” like agriculture didn’t occur until about 30,000 years after.  If the IQ of our species is judged only by the accomplishments we made at the same time as Neanderthals,  we had no higher developments either.

But Hsu seems to be saying “it’s not when you accomplish something that reflects IQ, but how long it took you to accomplish it.”    Obviously a more intelligent species will be expected to learn, invent and discover things faster than a less intelligent species,  but Homo Sapiens have been around a lot longer than 50-100 K.

I don’t doubt Homo Sapiens are smarter than Neanderthals and that we accomplished more, even contemporaneously, I’m just puzzled by the achievement rate over  50-100 K years being compared to “a much longer period of time”?

Perhaps you could say that anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record somewhere between 195 kya and 300 kya, depending on how you define “anatomically modern” and still exist today.  Let’s split the difference and say we’ve been around for 248,000 years.

Meanwhile Neanderthals first appear in the fossil record between 400 kya and 600 kya.  Again, splitting the difference, about 500 kya, but since they vanished 40 Kya, they lasted 460,000 years.

So maybe one could say our species accomplished far more in 248,000 years than Neanderthals accomplished in 460,000 year,  but this doesn’t really tell us much about our differing rates of accomplishment.

What is needed are achievements that Homo Sapiens made that Neanderthals also independently made, but at a later date, so we can compare.

For example, Homo Sapiens started engraving “quite a complex geometric pattern” by about 70 kya at Blombos Cave in South Africa.  Meanwhile Neanderthals started carving “abstract, almost geometric shapes” by about 40 kya in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar.

So could one argue that Homo Sapiens acquired this skill when our species was just 178,000 years old (248 kya – 70 kya) while Neanderthals didn’t acquire it until their species was 460,000 years old (500 kya – 40 kya)?

It’s tempting to apply the old age ratio method of calculating IQ to claim Neanderthals had an IQ only 39% as high as modern humans (178,000/460,000 = 0.39) but that’s clearly nonsense, and one of the reasons it’s nonsense is it’s not as if we were starting from scratch when we became our species 248,000 years ago, nor were Neanderthals starting from scratch when they became Neanderthals 500,000 years ago.  Both species were building on the accomplishments of ancestral forms.

So perhaps instead of starting the clock at the speciation point, we should start it at the last common ancestor of both species.  Research suggests “the early predecessors of humans diverged from those of Neanderthals between 550,000 and 765,000 years ago — too far back for the common ancestors of both to have been Homo heidelbergensis, as some had posited”.

Let’s split the difference and assume the two species diverged 658 kya, which means it took Homo Sapiens (and our ancestors) 588,000 years to create geometric designs (658 kya – 70 kya), while it took Neanderthals and their ancestors 618,000 years to do the same.  Applying the old ratio IQ method would now suggest their IQ was 85% as high as ours.  A lot more believable than 39%, but possibly still nonsense.

WARNING:  THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS!  IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980), PLEASE DO SO BEFORE READING.  IT’S FREE ON YOUTUBE.

In honor of it being Friday the 13th weekend, and so close to Halloween, I decided to estimate the IQs of every single character in Friday the 13th (1980).  I knowing this is boring nonsense to some readers, but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and now is perfect timing.

I began by counting how many biologically normal characters there were in the film and in a creepy coincidence, there were exactly thirteen!

Why do I separate the 13 biologically normal characters from the one pathological one (Jason)?  Because IQ tests have traditionally been normed on the biologically normal and typically (white) American or British population from which a normal bell curve is derived.  This is for statistical convenience but also reflects the view that one’s IQ reflects a great many genetic and environmental variants, which like the flip of a thousands coins, randomly determine whether you accumulate good or bad luck in the cognitive lottery; but since the effect of any one variant is so tiny,  most people will be in the middle and only a tiny percent will have an excess of good or bad brain luck.

However people like Jason have genetic disorders that so override the normal sources of polygenetic and environmental variation that they skew the bell curve, and are thus excluded from the norms of IQ tests.

Now assuming the 13 biologically normal characters in the film are a roughly representative sample of biologically normal white America, the next question is what would be their expected IQ distribution?   Since by definition, the IQs of biologically normal (white) American have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15,  a random sample of 13 such people might have something like the following IQs:

Now the fun part! Assigning each of the above 13 IQs to each of the 13 biologically normal characters.

In order from highest to lowest:

BIOLOGICALLY NORMAL CHARACTERS

Alice IQ 126 (Superior intelligence)

I assigned the highest IQ to the heroine Alice because she was the only camp counsellor with the alertness and quick thinking to beat the killer at her own game.  We also learn early in the film that she’s a talented sketch artist, suggesting she would do well on the Draw a Person IQ test.  And while her wide eyed innocence may seem naïve, this is a common trait in high IQ people who have the luxury and integrity of staying innocent longer, yet the fact that she adapted so quickly to unfolding horrors despite her charmed life, suggests high IQ.

Enos  IQ 116 (Bright Normal)

Although truck drivers aren’t known for their high intelligence,  Enos strikes me as the second brightest character in the film simply because he had the long-term memory to rattle off the camp’s dark history off the cuff: boy drowning in 1957, two counselors killed in 1958, bad water in 1962.  Most people can’t recall local history with such precision and speed.

Pamela Voorhees IQ 111 (Bright Normal)

One of the smartest killers in the history of slasher films.  Her ability to lure her victims to their death by correctly predicting they would take the bait is unsurpassed in the genre.  Also impressive was her ability to find Alice anywhere she hid in the camp, even though Alice was running, and always had a head start, and Pam was merely walking.

However whenever the two women would physically battle, Alice always won, even though Pam had the physical advantage in size, strength and height, though not in speed, suggesting Pam wasn’t smart enough to exploit her advantage.

Nonetheless, Pam’s creative use of lights and weapons, knowledge of the camp’s emergency generator, and ability to communicate effectively (“I can’t help you if you don’t calm down”) all point to high IQ.  I would even credit her with great acting skills, given how well she feigned innocence when Alice first met her, except I don’t think she was acting.  I think Pam was so detached from reality that she would sometimes forget she was the killer and act like a normal woman.  Such psychosis reveals a malfunctioning brain, and puts a ceiling on her likely IQ, as does the sheer irrationality of killing camp counselors for allowing your son to drown,  even though most of them were not even born at the time.

Ned Rubenstein IQ 109 (Average intelligence)

This guy reminds of the typical dorky goofball you knew in high school, who everyone thinks is dumb until he helps you with your math homework;  the kind of guy who feigns stupidity to get a cheap laugh.  And yet Ned doesn’t really show intelligence unless being good at archery is a sign of smarts,  but the fact that his idea of flirting is nearly shooting a girl’s head off with a bow and arrow, shows reckless stupidity.  Also showing stupidity was his inability to defend himself against female killer, despite not really being caught by surprise.

Nonetheless, he’s Ashkenazi Jewish, and these are thought to have genes associated with high IQ.  For that reason alone, he might be in the upper end of the average range.

Marcie Cunningham/Stanler  IQ 107 (Average intelligence)

When a snake that was terrorizing a cabin was chopped by a machete (I hope a real snake wasn’t killed for this movie), she delivered the funniest line of the film: “At least we know what’s for dinner”.  Such quick wit may imply a triple digit IQ, at least before the axe to the brain.

Barry Jackson IQ 100 (Average intelligence)

When asked by his girlfriend whether she kissed as well as another girl they knew, he replied “how would I know?” which was the perfect answer to an awkward question and worked like a charm.  This may imply an IQ above 100.

However given that he was likely one of the original camp counselors who made love instead of saving Jason from drowning, and thus was indirectly responsible for decades of mass murder, indicate a level of criminal negligence so extreme he’s likely not above 100.

Bill Brown IQ 99 (Average intelligence)

Bill is likely very close to triple digit IQ because he showed two signs of intelligence: 1) he’s one of the few who learned how to use the camp’s emergency generator, and 2) he successfully killed the snake that was terrorizing one of the cabins.

Claudette Hayes IQ 97 (Average intelligence)

Like her lover Barry Jackson, she can’t be too smart if she was making love when she should have been saving Jason from “drowning”.  On the other hand, the fact that she’s the only character who displays musical talent (playing the guitar) suggests she’s not too dumb either.

Brenda Jones IQ 96 (Average intelligence)

She showed some intelligence in suggesting a fun game the others counselors enjoyed (strip monopoly) and knowing the rules,  and the fact that she was ethical enough to go out into a thunderstorm to respond to cries for help, may indirectly imply she’s not dumb (since high IQ people tend to develop better character), even though it was a deadly trick she fell for.

Steve Christy IQ 88 (Dull normal)

The fact that he wastes his life trying to save a camp that is doomed, indicates low IQ.  Also the fact that he never figures out who the killer was, despite the fact that she is a family “friend” and is the only person with an obvious motive, also implies Dull Normal IQ.

On the other hand, the mere fact that he was born into a family rich enough to own a camp implies some high IQ genes.  Also fixing the camp keeps him in shape and lets him cunningly placate his perversion for very young women, so he’s at the upper end of Dull Normal.

Jack Burrell/Marand IQ 87 (Dull Normal)

The fact that he’s one of the few characters who knows how to use the camp’s emergency generator implies he’s not completely dumb.  However the fact that he has sex on the bottom bunk of bunk beds, when a dead body lies on the top bunk, and he’s too dumb to notice (despite being taller than the top bunk) implies Dull-Normal IQ.

Annie Phillips IQ 84 (Dull Normal)

Annie is completely adorable in a way that only dumb women are.

Crazy Ralph IQ 81 (Dull Normal)

The fact that he’s known as the town lunatic indicates low IQ, though ironically, his crazy ramblings are proven true.  Also, the fact that he rides a bike all the way to the camp suggests he’s either not smart enough to drive, or not smart enough to get the money for a car, and not wearing a helmet (or normal biking attire) also shows low IQ, though was probably a common mistake in the 1980s.  Though in Ralph’s defence, biking is good exercise and good for the environment.

BIOLOGICALLY ABNORMAL CHARACTER

Jason IQ 50 (Trainable (moderate) Retardation)

Because Jason was a hydrocephalic, he’s not part of the biologically normal population, and thus his IQ can not be guessed from the normal distribution of scores.  Nonetheless, as I wrote in 2014:

In the very first Friday the 13th movie (1980) (one of the best horror films ever) it was very subtly hinted by his mother that Jason was a special needs child when she used the euphemism “he wasn’t a very good swimmer”, and indeed the makeup artist who created Jason’s appearance described him as “hydrocephalic, mongoloid pinhead”. In Friday the 13th part 2, the main character mentions that Jason never went to school as a child. According to IQ expert Arthur Jensen, the minimum IQ needed to attend a regular school was 50 though Jason can’t be much lower than that because he manages to survive on his own in the woods from age the age of 11 to 34 and at age 34, kill a platoon of teenagers using a wide variety of weapons.

But Jason’s low IQ is revealed by his extreme gullibility. In Friday the 13th part 2, a college psychology major manages to trick Jason into thinking she is Jason’s mother simply by putting on his mother’s sweater, even though Jason personally witnessed his mother being beheaded and the college girl is more than a decade younger than Jason and thus can’t be his mother. In Friday the 13th part 4, Jason is tricked by a little boy who shaves his head and pretends to be young Jason himself, only to hack Jason to death. The fact that Jason was outsmarted and killed by a little kid half his size shows Jason was not too bright. Despite being killed at age 34 (short life span is another sign of low IQ, though a weak one) Jason returned in part 6 as a zombie.

Pumpkin Person rating: 9.5/10

WARNING THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.  IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980), PLEASE DO SO BEFORE READING FURTHER.

In honor of Friday the 13th being tomorrow, and falling so close to Halloween this year,  I had to review one of my favorite movies of all time:  Friday the 13th (1980).

Shortly after Halloween (1978) became the most successful independent movie of its time,  a platoon of slasher films rushed into production, hoping to replicate Halloween‘s success.  Of these, the most successful and influential was Friday the 13th.

Like Halloween before it, Friday the 13th was a movie about, and for, white America.  That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, just the reality of American culture circa 1980.

Both films revolved around most quintessential white experiences.  Halloween was about teenagers babysitting in the suburbs of a small Midwestern town, and Friday the 13th was about summer camp.

Both films had not a single non-white character.

Although Friday the 13th was set in 1980 (the year of its release),  it seems symbolic that its opening murder takes places in the 1950s: the glory days for white America, and the film begins by focusing on camp counselors who are unapologetically blond and blue eyed.  They sneak away from guitar duty to “fool around” in the upstairs of a cabin, not knowing someone is stalking the camp.  We see from the killer’s point of view that someone is walking through camp bedrooms as people sleep, and that someone is climbing up the stairs to punish the young couple.

The moon is full.

Fast forward to 1980 and a fresh batch of camp counselors is coming to work at what has been nicknamed “camp blood”.  One by one they are killed off,  as a demented old man named Ralph tries to warn them they are doomed if they stay there.

Unlike the original Halloween which relied more on suspense than gore, Friday the 13th reveled in blood and guts. We’re talking spears stabbing you from under your bed,  bloody corpses pinned to doors, and axes to the face.

But what made this disgusting display so brilliantly ironic, was that when the face of the killer was finally revealed, it was not the hulking hockey masked man we associate with the franchise, but an All-American 1950s style mom!

She was the lady next door, the girl scout leader,  the June Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver.

In a riveting performance by Betsy Palmer, we watch as this all American mom (Mrs Voorhees) from our TV dreams, who we think is there to save the day, slowly reveals herself to be the machete wielding homicidal slasher of our horror nightmares.

Driven mad with grief after her mentally retarded son Jason was allowed to drown because camp counselors were busy making love, she had been vengefully stalking the camp for a quarter century.

But if that weren’t enough of a twist, Friday the 13th has perhaps the best surprise ending of any horror film ever.  After surviving the night of camp blood and beheading Mrs Voorhees,  the heroine, Alice, gets into a canoe, and just drifts aimlessly.  In one of the most beautiful scenes in horror history, she wakes up in the boat to a glorious new morning.  Although supposedly June, the autumn leaves reflect multicolored hues in the morning lake, as she looks up to see the police there to rescue her.

And just when you think it’s a happy ending, the corpse of Mrs Voorhees drowned little hydrocephalic son, Jason,  jumped from his underwater grave to pull Alice into the lake.

Alice wakes up screaming in a hospital.  Apparently she must have just dreamed being pulled into the lake

But what makes the dream so utterly creepy is that in Friday the 13th part II,  Jason shows up at Alice’s home and murders her, except he’s not the corpse of a drowned little boy she saw in her dream,  but a grown-ass man in his thirties!

Apparently the mentally disabled Jason had never really drowned at all, but survived in the woods, too low in spatial IQ to find his way home, or, too low in social IQ to realize going home was the thing to do.

And just as Jason’s mother murdered teenagers at the camp to avenge the perceived drowning of her son, in the sequels, it’s Jason who kills teenagers at the camp to avenge the beheading of his mother.

Despite being just another brain dead horror franchise, it requires a certain intelligence to appreciate such plot symmetry.

With Halloween only weeks away, it’s time to take a terrifying drive down evolution road.

Imagine your father stood up beside the highway, and behind him stood your grandfather, and behind him stood your great-grandfather, and behind him stood your great, great-grandfather etc.  Now imagine you got in your car and started driving down this highway, beginning at your father, and ending at your most ancient ancestor.

Assuming you drove beside this line of ancestors at 100 km/hour which is pretty typical for a highway, it would take you just under 20 seconds to pass an ancestor who looked kind of Arab:

After driving  just three minutes beside the line of ancestors, you’d pass an ancestor who looked like a black man, at least if you believe the computer generated reconstruction of how folks looked 70,000 kya, endorsed by geneticist Spencer Wells:

Drive for half an hour, and you pass ancestors who look like this:

Drive for 90 minutes, and you pass ancestors who look liked this:

Robert Stark did a good job interviewing JayMan.  It’s always great to hear the voice behind the iconic blog, because there’s so much about a man’s intelligence and social class you can infer from the spoken word, that you can’t tell from his writings.

Of course the big interview everyone is waiting for is me though I don’t know who I would grant such a coveted interview to.

Agriculture was the ultimate test of prehistoric intelligence, because for the first time humans were able to purposefully manipulate the biology of plants and animals to their advantage.  Or at least to their perceived advantage (in reality agriculture caused a lot of disease and malnutrition).

What makes agriculture so fascinating is that it’s perhaps the most basic act of intelligence that Neanderthals and early modern humans never accomplished, and thus knowing the IQ required to invent agriculture puts a ceiling on not only Neanderthal IQ, but the IQ of our own species until recently.

On page 31 of The 10,000 Year Explosion, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending write:

The Eemian lasted from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago.  So for 15,000 long years,  nobody was smart enough to invent agriculture even though the climate was right.  And yet agriculture was independently invented over and over again in just the last 12,000 years.  This strongly suggests that humans today are genetically smarter than we were in the Middle Paleolithic.  The question is, did we evolve the intelligence to invent agriculture before or after we left Africa?  Perhaps we evolved it while still in Africa, and that’s what allowed us to leave Africa in the first place.

However on page 232 of Race, Evolution & Behavior (Third Edition), J. Philippe Rushton writes:

R. Lynn (1991a) suggested that although warm interglacial interludes had occurred previously, the transition to agricultural societies wasn’t possible until people became sufficiently intelligent to take advantage of the wild grasses.  According to Lynn, it was only after people had been through the last Wurm glaciation that they were cognitively able to do so.  Lynn’s view provides an explanation for why the advances were never made by Negroids or those southeast Asian populations that escaped the rigors of the last glaciation.

If agriculture was only invented by those who had survived the rigors of the last ice age, and only after they had done so,  this is strong evidence that cold winters are what selected for humanity’s high intelligence.

However this theory faced a major road block in 2003, when Tim Denham, an archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, reported evidence that Papua New Guineans (who judging from their Negroid appearance, escaped the rigors of the last ice age) were practicing agriculture as early as 10,000 years ago, which predates any known southeast Asian contact.

However by 2004, a book called The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline, published by the prestigious University of Toronto press, excluded Papua New Guinea from the agriculture pioneer club.  On page 50 author Roy M. Woodbridge  writes:

If the above paragraph is true, it’s very good news for Rushton’s Mongoloid > Caucasoid > Negroid evolutionary hierarchy, because of the five independent inventions of agriculture, an astonishing 80% were by Mongoloids, 20% were by Caucasoids, and 0% by Negroids, though ironically, it was the relatively low IQ Native American Mongoloids who dominate the list.

However in the next paragraph, Woodridge acknowledges the possibility that other groups may have also independently made the Neolithic transition but the evidence is less certain:

One reason to doubt that Africa’s Neolithic transition was independent is that it didn’t occur until 5000 BC.  What took so long?  The reason it took so long outside of Africa was that non-African modern humans didn’t have an interglacial period until the Holocene but would the ice age have equally delayed agriculture in Africa?  While tropical soils didn’t freeze, the ice age may have caused a lot of droughts in Africa.

So could Africans have independently invented agriculture once the ice age ended?  Lawyer, computer scientist, Princeton astrophysicist and best-selling historian Dr. Michael Hart writes on page 141 of his book Understanding Human History:

In neither Europe nor India was agriculture developed independently.  It has been suggested that it was invented independently in tropical West Africa and/or the Sudan but the chronology makes this highly unlikely.  We know that agriculture was being widely practiced in the Fertile Crescent by 9 kya, but it was not practiced in tropical West Africa until 5 kya.  In the intervening millennia, it had spread to Egypt (about 8 kya) and to Ethiopia, and from there across the Sudan, reaching the Western Sudan about 7 kya.