If he’s good with a basketball or football, he’s pretty much guaranteed a Bachelors degree.
The Cro-Magnons were a ‘race’ (in the ethnological sense, like Mediterranean or Ainu) with particular physiognomic characters; some local populations in Sweden and the Guanches are both thought to be surviving populations of their descendants. So I’d have to give them, and essentially anything more ‘modern’ than them, full equality of capacity with any modern population.
For all of that, Australian aboriginals were living in a Neolithic culture not far removed from “cave man” culture save for the differences in climate, and many of them have become national and occasionally international celebrities, generally in sports or the arts.
The “classic” Neandertals of Ice Age Europe were specialized for their environment, and would probably stick out in a crowd – recessed eye sockets and a prognathous, prominent nose and jaws would tend to stand out. In terms of brain capacity, they were clearly our equals. And what little we’ve been able to deduce of Neandertal culture from archaeological studies suggests that they were the equals of H.s. sapiens culturally. However, there is a school of thought among paleoanthropologists that suggests Neandertals were physiologically unable to talk – in the sense of, speak words such as modern languages or their predecessors might use, not necessarily, unable to communicate by voice – the position of the hyoid bone and presumably the related soft tissue was sufficiently different to militate against using most modern phonemes. I don’t assert this as fact but merely report it as inferences drawn by some specialists in that field of study.
Re read Robby’s post #8.
The info in that post points to a chance of NO being the answer.
If you think that “cavemen” and dinosaurs lived at the same time, you need to first learn something about both of them. Read the Wikipedia article on dinosaurs, who died out 65,000,000 years ago:
Now read the article about human evolution, where it explains that humans appeared no more than 400,000 years ago:
Furthermore, you need to learn that “cavemen” is a misnomer, since there never was a significant period in the history of humanity when anyone lived in caves.
You’re trying to talk about a difficult subject, the evolution of intelligence in humans, when you don’t even know about a simple subject, the time periods for dinosaurs and humans.
“You’re trying to talk about a difficult subject, the evolution of intelligence in humans, when you don’t even know about a simple subject, the time periods for dinosaurs and humans.”
Yeah and George W. Bush was elected President Twice even though he is an idiot and the greatest serial killer of American Citizens ever and Sarah Palin could have been enabled to be in the position of President when she’s a bigger idiot!
We can’t do anything about Bush or Palin being in office or being nominated for an office. We can do something about teaching you. If someone came to us not knowing arithmetic and wanted to know about some difficult question that involved calculus, we’d have to tell them that they needed to start by learning arithmetic.
Look, you obviously are interested in learning. You’ve asked a very difficult question that there is a lot of controversy about. You don’t know some basic issues about the same subject. Learn about the basic issues and then you can learn about the advanced ones.
I’ll bet that George W. Bush knows that humans and dinosaurs never co-existed, though. :rolleyes:
I’m not sure about Sarah Palin. 
Evidence indicates that he could grow up to be a successful lawyer.
This thread is making me miss Phil Hartman all over again.
Consider the cave art inLascaux. I admit that it is relatively new (17,000 years old) by the standards of our discussion so far, but it certainly illustrates artistic mastery at least on par with our current society.
I’d say there’s no particular reason to think that our direct ancestors within our species were in any way slackers in the brains department.
Seriously, Hershon4, listen to what Wendell Wagner is saying. It’s fairly basic elementary school knowledge that humans and dinosaurs never co-existed. I mean, it’s not even close. As others have stated, the dinosaurs went extinct about **65 million years **ago. The most advanced mammals alive at this time were small shrew-like animals.
The first primates didn’t come along until 5-10 million years *after * the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. (Humans are primates, a group that also includes lemurs, monkeys, and apes.)
Apes (more specifically, the Superfamily Hominoidea) didn’t split from Old World monkeys until about 30 million years ago. (Humans are also considered to be apes.)
The Great Apes (family Hominidae) separated from the other apes about 15-20 million years ago. Surviving members of this group includes chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans.
The last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees (our closest surviving relative) lived between 5-7 million years ago.
The knowledge is out there–you just have to take advantage of it. I wouldn’t get your information from movies and popular culture.
Homo Erectus was the first hominid to use fire. They existed from 1.8 million years ago to about 70,000 years ago. Looking at their wiki page, they don’t appear to have foreheads, and have heavy brow ridges. I suspect they would have trouble in public schools.
According to the wiki/human evolution link above, it appears that Homo sapiens branched off the Homo Erectus/Egaster line about 1.4 million years ago into the Homo Antecessor (of which there are only a few fossils, so not much is known about their tool use), then the Homo Heidelbergensis (which had nearly the same brain size, and possibly language abilities). H. H. hunted, buried the dead, used stone tools.
Then came H. Sapiens, 200 thousand years ago. It took us 195,000 years to get our shit together. Someone who is cynical might say that we are barely civilized cave men, merely hitting each other over the heads with fancier sticks.
“At the time of discovery of fire” is a bit ambiguous, too: Do you mean when folks first started using fire, or when we first started making it? Because the first use of fire depended on finding naturally-occurring fire and carefully saving some. Going from no-fire to fire is much more difficult.
People have this idea that human ancestors lived in caves, but that’s a misconception. Sure, there were some that lived in caves, just like there are a few people today who live in caves. But the vast, vast majority didn’t. So why do we find artifacts and stuff in caves? Because caves preserved the evidence.
If you have a grass hut out on the savannah, and you live there and die there, after 100 years nothing will be left. The grass will crumble, your bones will be eaten by hyaenas, and everything you made will be scattered to the winds. But if you lived in a cave, that cave might be there 50,000 years later. And all the artifacts you dropped will still be there, preserved, the drawings you made will still be there, and if you died there your skeleton might even still be there, unless other humans carried you out of the cave.
The notion that “cave men” were a particular type of human and ancestral to modern humans is misguided. If you’re talking about Geico commercial cavemen, those guys aren’t supposed to be Cro Magnons, they’re archaic Homo sapiens of some type, or Neandertals. Cro Magnons were fully modern humans, and yes, if you adopted a Cro Magnon baby the baby would grow up to be a normal modern human, just like if you adopted a baby from a tribe in New Guinea.
However, if you adopted a Neandertal baby, or a Geico commercial style “caveman”, that baby probably would not grow up to be a typical child. Neandertals looked different from us–they were shorter, stockier, more muscular, with thicker bones, thicker skulls and heavy brow ridges. And their brains on average were LARGER than modern human brains–but organized differently. They had smaller frontal lobes, but larger occipital lobes. So they had smaller foreheads, but their skulls were longer. So it’s very likely that Neandertals thought differently than modern humans, but of course we have no way of telling for sure. One thing we do know, the Neadertal toolkit remained stable, for tens of thousands of years they made used the same tool designs. When modern humans show up, all of the sudden we see all kinds of different tools. And pretty soon we see elaborate artwork, which Neandertals never produced.
However, interestingly, anatomically modern *Homo sapiens *existed for thousands of years before behaviorly modern Homo sapiens. Meaning, the flowering of innovation and artwork didn’t occur with the first Homo sapiens sapiens 200,000 years ago, but rather 50,000 years ago. So what caused behavioral modernity? Nobody knows.
I’d count it from Lascaux, so only 183,000 years. 
Damn straight. You only have to watch Survivor to appreciate this fact. Apparently Boston Rob is the only Cro-Magnon equivalent on the island.
It’s worth noting too that further back you get into archaic Homo Sapiens, our precursors - depending when exactly you picked the baby from you could have very different results, due to punctuated equilibrium in the development of the brain. Research indicates that these early ancestors did use language, so there’s no reason they wouldn’t be able to pick up English. If you’re talking about when fire was first implemented, these are the guys you need to look to; in China a site has been occupied for hundreds of thousands of years starting from ~770,000 B.P., and shows evidence of fire control. There’s also the possibility that it has been used at a site in Israel ~790,000 B.P.
Anatomically modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, and are, for all intents and purposes - us, Homo Sapiens Sapiens. As with the evolution of all species, there’s no real line you can draw at a certain date we the ‘first man’ is born. Dawkins in ‘The Ancester’s Tale’ has a good section on this.
Other than echoing the genetic differences mentioned in post #8, I’d add that nutrition could be a major factor. If we’re taking a baby that survived a stone-age pregnancy, there’s a higher chance that the mother lived in circumstances that didn’t provide her with what we’d consider proper nutrition. People nowadays make a big deal about beefing up on folic acid and other supplements… but this baby would be taken from a period where mothers worried about getting enough food of any kind.
Since you’re talking just one kid, it’s a crap shoot - maybe he got everything to be perfectly healthy and normal and maybe his tribe barely survived the last winter and he’s got significant deficiencies. But if you took a large sampling of kids, my money says they’ll perform less well than modern kids based on nutritional and developmental issues alone.
Those guys keep trying to friend me on Facebook too!
I took one anthropology class in college, and I know the basics (that humans didn’t use pterodactyls as hedge clippers, for example), but that last bit (the great length of time between the arrival of anatomically modern humans, and the sudden explosion of innovation and art) is new to me.
That’s pretty interesting. I suppose if we were to invent a time machine, and conduct the experiment the OP describes, it would go a long way in answering why it took us so long to develop art.
Ditto. (I was just thinking along the same lines.)
Animals don’t wonder why, (and how) it rains. They just enjoy it when it happens. Humans did wonder about that stuff, and eventually much more.
I don’t know when the big break into the more abstract realm of thinking occurred, but it is key, I think, to our history.
It’s more likely the other way around. Hunter-gatherers tend to have a pretty healthy diet, the diet that our digestive systems evolved for. They eat plenty of plant food from dozens or hundreds of sources. Compare that to diet coke and microwave burritos. Plus one big advantage is that hunter-gatherers were largely free of infectious disease, due to very low population densities.
It’s only in the last 100 years or so that modern humans have re-approached the levels of health, brain size, and height that pre-agricultural humans had.