I wonder if what makes humans "intelligent" is exactly this. Plus we have a 70-90 years of life. Which is long enough to learn and do stuff, compare that to 10-15 years for your average crow.
We start bombarding babies with information since a very early age. Parents, are incentivized to teach their babies how to talk, walk, read, write, do stuff, eat, sing, etc... The amount of cognitive exercise is insane. And a human will only be able to "say" something useful until he is 7-8 year old. He's kinda of a "retard" before that. That's 7-8 years of training just to get started.
Then humans get bombarded with education: Math, Physics, Language, Writing, Sports, etc... And they are a strict about going to school and performing well. That would take another 12-15 years of your life to, hopefully, learn something useful to society. Add to that 3-4 years of learning in the job, and a human is only able to bring food to the table after 25-26 years of learning and training.
That's a hell lot of time. No other animals in the wild are given this chance. Let alone their environments and their physical capacities are taken into consideration. We judge animal intelligence by comparing it to our self-architectured modern environment.
tl;dr: Humans might not be smart after all. It might be that we have been lucky that our ancestors have started the ball rolling and we have had enough time during our lifetime to make up for the initial investment of learning.
My 10 year old can start a fire, create a shelter, gather/sterilize water, hunt, trap, clean game and cook it. Humans are scary smart compared to other life and can easily pickup survival skills, manipulate their environments to suit them, even as a child.
Sounds like a good theory, until you think about animals like parrots and turtles. Both of those have lifespans that are about as long as that of humans, and no doubt they are very intelligent (esp. pronounced with parrots), but not smart enough to be able to support your hypothesis.
How so? My hypothesis is that if a human is not exposed to this curricula of learning, he'll be close to these animals in intelligence. I don't know of any such humans. I also don't know of any such parrot that was given a learning program for 25 years.
I'd say it still takes a lot of intelligence for all that training to be effective. If we were much dumber it wouldn't even help. Long life is probably necessary but definitely not sufficient.
We start bombarding babies with information since a very early age. Parents, are incentivized to teach their babies how to talk, walk, read, write, do stuff, eat, sing, etc... The amount of cognitive exercise is insane. And a human will only be able to "say" something useful until he is 7-8 year old. He's kinda of a "retard" before that. That's 7-8 years of training just to get started.
Then humans get bombarded with education: Math, Physics, Language, Writing, Sports, etc... And they are a strict about going to school and performing well. That would take another 12-15 years of your life to, hopefully, learn something useful to society. Add to that 3-4 years of learning in the job, and a human is only able to bring food to the table after 25-26 years of learning and training.
That's a hell lot of time. No other animals in the wild are given this chance. Let alone their environments and their physical capacities are taken into consideration. We judge animal intelligence by comparing it to our self-architectured modern environment.
tl;dr: Humans might not be smart after all. It might be that we have been lucky that our ancestors have started the ball rolling and we have had enough time during our lifetime to make up for the initial investment of learning.