I like to believe that humans think the same way now as we did 50000 years ago. With thinking, I mean the strength of it, the speed, what we can accomplish with it. If it is possible to develop a good IQ test, we wouldn’t do much better now than someone living all those years ago, someone who’s figuring out how to crack the right stone to get a knife out of it. We have a much larger well of knowledge right now, which can aid us, making it appear that we are much smarter. On the other hand, there are probably not more than a 100 people who are living in modern houses right now who can make a good flint knife, and only because they studied it and not because they figured it out by themselves. All I want to say is that there were also Einsteins living at the beginning of our civilization; the only difference is that they lacked the instruments and wealth of knowledge collected and written down that they could build their theories on, and most of all, they lacked any means to let us modern people know what they knew. We have this wealth of apparent knowledge, and we all know more on average than someone living a hundred years ago, but that doesn’t mean we are smarter, let alone that we make better decisions.  

Humans are the product of many millions of years of evolutionary development, and how and why we think the way we do is still not completely clear. It is clear that on an evolutionary timescale, some form of consciousness just happened a second ago, and from the first caveman to me writing this is measured in milliseconds. Thinking in the sense of explaining ourselves also plays a minor role in our daily business, so to speak. We often react and come up with a reason for why we reacted that way after the fact. The words we use function more as bandages in many cases. An example of a trigger we inherited is that most of us jump from sudden movements in our peripheral vision because millions of evolutionary years have “learned” us that jumping is better than not jumping. After all, the jumpers get bitten less by that nasty snake crawling on their path and live to tell the tale. Many of our behaviours exist because they are part of millions of years of evolution. Before we had words, writing, and laws, we already had thoughts in the form of feelings that drove us and made us jump out of fear for crawling creatures, but for thousands of years, we could not talk about these feelings with each other. We moved together in small groups in similar ways, lived together like we do now, but in silence, doing what felt best. The different human species lived like that for a long time, and it is only a relatively short time ago that we started talking about what was driving us and why we are doing the things we do. 

In that sense, we are still infants. Look at our society now, in 2025. We have a democracy like the ancient Greeks already had, and people still vote, and like in ancient times, they still vote for the loudest baboon. It doesn’t matter that the baboon speaks; it matters that he touches the right feelings, feelings we react to more than words, let alone logic. The people who know the right words to “enhance” their feelings understand that the baboon only makes noises, but they also know that a modern human is no match for a baboon. There is no denying that a strong figure in a group is something that has helped the human species along. We all felt safe in our mother’s arms, and that strong feeling lingers on in adulthood. When a fire breaks out, we all probably follow the loudest voice.