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The discovery of flatbread remains from around 14,500 years ago in northeastern Jordan indicate that people began making bread, a vital staple food, millennia before they were thought to have developed agriculture. The charred bread residue was found in a stone fireplace at an archeological site there.
Reuters : World's oldest bread found at prehistoric site in Jordan
Haaretz : Archaeologists Find 14,400-year-old Pita in Jordan's Black Desert
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World's Oldest Bread Found at Prehistoric Site in Jordan
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:04PM (1 child)
I'd be very cautious about making such a sweeping generalization about intelligence. We don't entirely agree on what intelligence is, let alone how to measure it. We use the IQ tests we have for lack of better measures, but there are several issues with them. They're heavy on mathematics, and they probably have cultural biases. Among many other things, they don't test for ability to discern what others are thinking and feeling, no "emotional quotient".
I find the results of trying to create AI to play chess most instructive. Chess was seized upon as an easy way to measure intelligence. Good chess players are smart. (However the converse is not true-- there are many smart people who suck at chess.) And so we tried for decades to make computers play chess well, on the idea that if we could do that, we would have successfully created general AI. And then, when computers finally did get so good at chess no human could beat them any more, the manner in which they succeeded at chess served to show the game is not such a good measure of intelligence as was thought. The computer chess champ was hardly more than a very, very fast brute force searcher through billions of possible chess moves.
An explanation for the Flynn effect is adaptability. If anything is adaptable, capable of learning new things, it's the young. We're constantly tweaking education, and it surely would be tweaked in directions that would help children on those tests. Those tests represent what we think intelligence is about, and therefore are a prime tool-- more than a tool, an objective in themselves-- for measuring how our education is working. Give them different tests, perhaps some sort of test of scout/wilderness savvy that would be vital to a Stone Age human, and they would probably fail spectacularly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:13PM
Exactly! IQ tests suggest that African Americans are on average 20 points less intelligent than anglo-Americans, but that has been proven entirely due to cultural appropriation factors. If you add 20 points to their score, their results are identical. If you add 30 points, they are even smarter (on average).