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A good friend of mine made the following claim:

If we would have a time machine and use it to gather newborns from different eras of human history and would put them in normal and nurturing families they would have the same chances to succeed in today's world as normally born children.

I would really like that to be true. I think it would be a very humbling fact and would make an astounding argument in favor of education and free access to information. At the same time it's the first time I heard that argument and it seems hard to proof.

Is there any research done on this subject?

Christian
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Andreas H
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    This is a difficult question to answer because you need to cover DNA (not changed that much), prenatal malnutrition (affects newborns) and possibly malnutrition during the infant years (which wouldn't matter in this precise case). – MSalters Sep 19 '11 at 10:14
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    I find it hard to imagine any factual way how to answer this without having access to time machine (perhaps reconstruction of our ancestors from their DNA might work as well). – Suma Sep 19 '11 at 10:18
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    I don't find it a very humbling fact! I don't assume our ancestors were stupider (Flynn Effect notwithstanding.) Is there anyone who believes that our (recent) ancestors WERE significantly less-likely-to-succeed-however-you-define-that? – Oddthinking Sep 19 '11 at 10:28
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    I’ve often heard a hard version of this claim: our ancestors were in fact much smarter than we. A prominent version of this claim can be found in Thilo Sarrazin’s book “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (~ “Germany abandons itself”), a pseudo-scientific diatribe about foreign cultures, written by a prominent politician. He repeats the claim that we’re getting dumber by the generation since uneducated people breed faster. Perhaps the question could actually be updated to reflect this (notable!) stronger claim? – Or is this a different question? – Konrad Rudolph Sep 19 '11 at 11:07
  • I don't want to make it about genetics traits. Genetic traits are very diverse within a given Generation. I think the core of my question is really how big a factor is the accumulated information for our abilities and limitations. If we can reasonably assume that it is the major factor as the claim mentions what does this mean about the way we treat information and education today? – Andreas H Sep 19 '11 at 11:35
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    I have heard the same claim that any human from the past 200,000 years or so is neurologically (as far as we can tell) basically the same animal. So I think this is a genuine claim, and I think there is data for it (I just have no idea how to find it). – JasonR Sep 19 '11 at 11:43
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    I think we have to consider the contraposition: Are humans today *less stupid* than they were 2000 or 10,000 years ago? TV programs like *Jackass* or *Jersey Shore* lead me to believe that we are *more stupid* than our 10,000 years-ago ancestors. – oosterwal Sep 19 '11 at 20:31
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    @oosterwal - Just because nobody was around 2000 years ago to film the contemporanious versions of people doing jackass things, doesn't mean it wasn't done. – user5341 Sep 21 '11 at 08:31
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    @DVK: Agreed, but are we now doing jackass things at an accelerated rate? – oosterwal Sep 21 '11 at 11:57
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    My own experience with uneducated farmers in the south is that they have a *huge* knowledge on plants and animals, but often lack skills that we find obvious, like calculating 23+5. Their intelligence is different from what we usually consider as intelligence. – johanvdw Sep 21 '11 at 12:05
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    [The Economist](http://www.economist.com/node/21522912) (via Pharyngula) points out that the sheer number of human-years lived per year is much, much higher than 20 centuries ago. I suspect that it, alone, explains why there may be an acceleration in both the number of jackass and the number of genius events that happen - with no need to posit a change in the genetic contribution to intelligence. – Oddthinking Sep 21 '11 at 15:12
  • @Oddthinking: +1. In other words, the bell curve isn't shifting it's growing. This means the average stays the same but the total number of outliers increases. – oosterwal Sep 21 '11 at 21:46
  • @KonradRudolph: At risk of Godwinning, did the nazis also believe that people with bad traits outbred others? – Andrew Grimm Jan 30 '12 at 09:15
  • My biggest question is, how do they really know the intelligence level of these ancestors without actually testing them? Two people (both from modern times) with similar brain sizes can have wildly different levels of intelligence. I could see how one could analyze brain tissue and come up with a good guess at how smart someone was. But without any brain tissue left over from our ancestors, how would they determine how smart these people really were? – Kibbee Jan 30 '12 at 18:10
  • @Andrew Not sure but I think they did, one of the main tenets of *Mein Kampf* being that inferior races such as the fellah would outbreed the pure races. – Konrad Rudolph Jan 31 '12 at 12:00
  • [From Larian's aswer on another question](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/377/how-were-the-pyramids-built/1460#1460), he suggests this book as a source for this information: Citation: Hominid Brain Evolution Testing Climatic, Ecological, and Social Competition Models, Drew H. Bailey & David C. Geary, Hum Nat (2009) 20:67-79, DOI 10.1007/s12110-008-9054-0. He seems to indicate that the answer to your question is indeed yes. Sadly, I do not have access to that book, maybe someone else does. This would make a good community wiki I suppose? – JasonR Jan 30 '12 at 13:10
  • Somewhere in this theory we need a cut-off point. Can we take the time-machine back 2000 years? 20,000 years? 200,000 years (beginning of sub-species homo sapiens sapiens)? 500,000 years (beginning of species homo sapiens), 2,500,000 years (beginning of the genus homo)? Can we go back to fish? – Oddthinking May 05 '12 at 23:57
  • Related film: [Idiocracy](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Idiocracy). – galacticninja May 24 '12 at 06:41
  • Research has found a correlation between intelligence and the disease burden at a national level. I haven't seen any attempt to break out diseases suffered by the mother during pregnancy vs ones suffered by the child afterwards. If the former is significant it would influence results. http://www.economist.com/node/16479286 – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight May 24 '12 at 15:43
  • @MSalters: I think you would also need to account for the effect of adoption itself... along with what Christian wrote in the answer. – adam.r Nov 25 '13 at 10:01
  • @AndreasH: The way the question is posed, I can only interpret it as focusing on pre-natal contributors to intelligence, and the main interesting effect would be genetics. Adaptive maternal effects would also be interesting... but not things like prenatal nutrition. – adam.r Nov 25 '13 at 10:04

1 Answers1

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No, because of epigenetic effects it's unlikely that a child that spent 9 month in the womb of an average mother who lived thousand years ago would be well adapted for today's world.

Over most of human history, people didn't have enough to eat.

If you randomly take a child from history there is a good chance that food for its mother wasn't plentiful.

After the Dutch famine of 1944 we saw that the children of mothers who carried them during that time were more likely to get diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, microalbuminuria and other health problems.

Viral antibodies that a child gathers during pregnancy are also important to allow the child to deal with the illnesses of their environment.

Despite this, given the nature of viral evolution, it's unlikely that the child from history would suffer any worse in that regard than a modern child.

Christian
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  • Yes, one vital voice on nutrition-Flynn effect link, Lynn, 2009: "[Third, to propose that improvements in pre-natal and early post-natal nutrition are the most probable factor responsible for the increases in DQs and IQs.](http://psychology.ro/files/AnunturiID/efectul%20flynn.PDF)" – Ruben Jun 24 '12 at 21:44
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    The question was specifically about *intelligence*. – AIB Jul 19 '12 at 14:45
  • @AIB Things that make you unhealthy are also likely to reduce your intelligence. – Christian Jan 17 '13 at 17:03
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    @Christian is there a study to support this claim? – Falco Feb 12 '15 at 14:53