At least five years ago, I became perhaps the first person to try to estimate the IQ of Bushmen from the IQs of the races that gave rise to South Africa’s Coloureds. Commenter Someguy has also tried this but I assume he was inspired by me, but he’s so bright he may have thought of it independently.
But commenter Mug of Pee made an important point:
south africa’s coloreds in general aren’t the same as cape coloreds.
are they?
“colored” under apartheid did not just mean cape coloreds.
did it?
interesting that “kaffir” (a word borrowed from muslim slavers) is now like “[n word redacted by pp, 2022-02-05]”. but colored is still socially acceptable. just like in the US referring to blacks as “coloreds” had become offensive, but now non-whites are referred to with more than twice as many syllables with “people of color”.
it’s the stupidity stupid.
it’s the cape coloreds who are plurality bushman. the reason why the cape coloreds are koi-san is because when the dutch landed there were no bantus for like 500 miles in all directions.
and “khoesan” should be hyphenated. there’re two peoples, the koi and the san.
So who are the Coloureds who scored IQ 85 in K Owen’s 1992 paper on Raven IQ in South African standard seven school kids? “The coloured sample consisted of 778 pupils drawn from 20 coloured schools in the Cape Peninsula” he wrote.
The most authoritative source I could find on Coloured genetic admixture is Uren et al. 2017 which gives the following data:
Ignoring the first study because it failed to separate Bushmen from other Blacks and averaging the most recent three, we get the following admixture levels: 30% Bantu, 34% Bushmen, 15% White, 7% Chinese and 14% South Asian. We know from Owen’s study (after I adjusted for 1991 HDI) that South African Bantu, Whites and South Asians had IQs of 80, 98 and 92 respectively.
The Chinese are usually said to have IQs around 105, however the Chinese ancestors of Coloureds were likely indentured labourers. Lynn (2006) noted that in the United States, the descendants of Chinese who arrived as labourers had IQs of only 101 so I’m adopting this as the best estimate for South Africa’s Chinese.
Thus Coloured genetic IQ = 0.30 (Bantu genetic IQ) + 0.34 (Bushmen genetic IQ) + 0.15 (White genetic IQ) + 0.07 (Chinese genetic IQ) + 0.14(South Asian genetic IQ)
85 = 0.30(80) + 0.34(Bushmen genetic IQ) + 0.15(98) + 0.07(101) + 0.14(92)
85 = 24 + 0.34(Bushmen genetic IQ) + 14.7 + 7.07 + 12.88
85 = 58.65 + 0.34(Bushmen genetic IQ)
85 – 58.65 = 0.34(Bushmen genetic IQ)
78 = Bushmen genetic IQ
So contra Richard Lynn, it seems Bushmen are roughly as intelligent as the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Their socio-economic disadvantage was caused by physical inferiority and distance from the civilized Arab World, and not from low genetic IQ.
A sub-Saharan is a sub-Saharan is a sub-Saharan.
Pumpkin Person 
I see now that I was unclear in my previous comment; I meant I had also tried to calculate *colored* genetic IQs(from admixture data) and just ignorantly assumed Bushmen genetic IQs for that purpose. Since Bushmen are virtually extinct I didn’t have much interest in them per se. Thanks for the compliment though!
I don’t think it can be assumed that Bushmen are representative of early humans though.
Since hunter-gatherers have enjoyed a similar lifestyle over the ages presumably skull size is a better proxy of genotypic and phenotypic intelligence for them, do we know if their skull sizes have changed over time? Whether Bushmen or any other hunter-gatherers.
There’s been a global trend of shrinking cranial capacity since the Upper Paleolithic (though it appears to have mostly rebounded at least in the U.S. & probably the whole developed World).
Richard Lynn argues this was just malnutrition caused by switching from hunter-gatherer to agriculture diet, and only in the 20th century did we recover our Paleolithic nutrition, causing brains and height (and IQ) to return to their genetic size.
However the counter-argument is brain shrinkage also occurred in Bushmen and Australian aboriginals, despite no agriculture.
However I argue that these groups also became malnourished by agriculture, but indirectly.
They were pushed off the most fertile lands by invading farmers.
I see. All these environmental nuances leads me to the following conclusion:
broke: phenotypic data
woke: genotypic data
The estimate of Chinese admixture into the Coloured population seems high and the south Asian is way to high. South Asians (Indians) moved to a province to the north, and the number of Madagascar and Malay slaves in the Cape was not that significant admixture into creating the Cape Coloureds (the Cape Malays are a separate Coloured ethnic category, who are Muslim, versus Christian or animist).
almost all people are malevolent and selfish. this is why people never put competent people in charge.