What you are actually having is a visceral reaction to your misunderstanding of how the English language works with the word ‘you’ in this circumstance.
All the American cars (Ford, Chevrolet, GM...) are much cheaper in Europe than eg. German cars from their trifecta (and other Europe-made high end vehicles from eg Sweden, Italy or UK), and on par with mid-priced vehicles from the likes of Hyundai, Kia, Mazda...
Obviously, some US brands do not compete on price, but other than maybe Jeep and Tesla, those have a small market penetration.
> "Maybe even smarter as there was no lead poisoning their brains!"
It's a good guess the people who made these artifacts (the bronze ones particularly) suffered from lead poisoning: lead was a primary alloying metal for bronze. You can even look up elemental analysis for BMAC bronze artifacts specifically: "...contain appreciable amounts of arsenic (up to 3%) and lead (up to 4%), as did bronzes of the preceding chronological horizons"[0].
The early smelting techniques simply released everything into the open atmosphere, as fine particulate fumes. Environmental samples going back 5,200 years show regional-scale lead pollution[1] from Bronze Age metals smelting.
("The smelting- and cupellation-related release of Pb into the environment is predominantly via the fine-particle fraction and, as such subject to large-scale atmospheric transport, resulting in a supra-regional to hemisphere-wide distribution9,10,11,20,21,22,23")
Sorry if you were offended, I was just making a joke. I don’t believe the ancient aliens theories, but a lot of people do, and that’s what I was poking fun at.
They didn't know about equality, bacteria, electromagnetism, fallibilism, evolution ... so you must mean a kind of "fully intelligent" that includes extremely ignorant people with bad ideas.
You didn’t know about those either. You were taught it by someone else, who learned about it from someone else, and so on. Sure some people discovered things along the way but you specifically don’t get credit for their progress. Does that make you ignorant? What about all the things that those people did discover or invent - surely you can see how the progress they made at that time, with so few resources and advancements, was truly revolutionary. Some of those advancements were far harder and significant than the stuff we like to point at in modern times like rockets.
Credit? Screw credit, that's not what I'm talking about. By accident, good ideas wander into our minds and make us smart. OK, there's some amount of positive feedback in this process (ideas about how to accumulate more good ideas). But "ignorance" means being uninformed, that is, not lucky enough to be inhabited by many of these good ideas in the first place. And there's a lot more of them floating around in modern times, and so it's harder to be ignorant, and easier to be lucky, and well-informed, and since ideas help with being a smarty-pants, it's easier to stumble into being smart. Thus ancient people were stupid, in a manner of speaking.
While they may not have known many things we know today, they had a better grasp of masonry, pottery, and metallurgy than most people today. Likewise, these are people who understood human experience quite well, and understood the animals and plants around them better than most of us today.
Regarding sanitation, there is evidence that they understood the corruption of the flesh and many Bronze Age cultures had topical treatments that were quite effective antiseptics. So, while not understanding what bacteria are, they still knew the effect.
And many of those ideas are quite old. People have been dealing with their own minds for quite some time, and the past had far fewer distractions from facing one’s self. Things like mindfulness, CBT, theory of mind, and most philosophy are built upon quite ancient traditions, observations, and beliefs.
How about: ancient people had brains that were physically similar to anyone modern, and sometimes they came up with one or two good ideas, but they were generally poorly informed and full of misconceptions by modern standards.
There seem to be one group of people that seem to take offence by people being hyperbolic (which this is) and another group of people that aren't. I personally find it baffling why anyone would be bothered by that comment.
Excellent point. It’s bad for humans when humans do it! Imagine the perfect sycophant, never tires or dies, never slips, never pulls a bad facial expression, can immediately swerve their thoughts to match yours with no hiccups.
It was a danger for tyrants and it’s now a danger for the lonely.
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