Indeed, to some scientists the find supports the idea that mental abilities associated with modern humans emerged when anatomically modern humans did, about 200,000 years ago, rather than resulting from a genetic mutation cropping up between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, as others have posited.
According to the “cultural brain hypothesis,” humans evolved large brains and great intelligence in order to keep up with our complex social groups. We've always been a social species, and we may have developed our intelligence in part to maintain those relationships and function successfully in these environments.
Rapidly increasing sophistication in tool-making and behaviour is apparent from about 80,000 years ago, and the migration out of Africa follows towards the very end of the Middle Paleolithic, some 60,000 years ago.
To those who knew of his son, William James Sidis was quite possibly the smartest man who ever lived. Born in Boston in 1898, William James Sidis made the headlines in the early 20th century as a child prodigy with an amazing intellect. His IQ was estimated to be 50 to 100 points higher than Albert Einstein's.
Summary: By using highly advanced brain imaging technology to observe modern humans crafting ancient tools, a neuroarchaeologist has found evidence that human-like ways of thinking may have emerged as early as 1.8 million years ago.
Genetic studies have demonstrated that humans are still evolving. To investigate which genes are undergoing natural selection, researchers looked into the data produced by the International HapMap Project and the 1000 Genomes Project.
Robin Dunbar, author of Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior and a professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford, provides this wisdom: No animal will develop human-like intelligence if its circumstances don't become similar to those that required our ancestors to develop bigger brains.
The appropriately named Marilyn vos Savant is in a class of her own. According to Guinness World Records, her astonishing IQ of 228 is the highest ever recorded. The daughter of an Italian and a German immigrant, vos Savant was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1946.
William James Sidis has the World's Highest IQ. Anywhere from 250 to 300 is his IQ score, almost twice the score of Albert Einstein. At the age of eleven, William famously entered Harvard University, becoming the youngest person to enter.
Humans lost their body hair, they say, to free themselves of external parasites that infest fur -- blood-sucking lice, fleas and ticks and the diseases they spread. Once hairlessness had evolved through natural selection, Dr. Pagel and Dr.
Modern humans' ancient relatives were probably not Mensa material, but an exciting new discovery by paleoanthropologists suggests they were much more sophisticated than scientists had thought. The new study appears in the latest edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science (PDF).
Several studies corroborate the fact that our ancestors were far stronger than us, and that human strength and fitness has decreased so dramatically in recent years that even the fittest among us wouldn't be able to keep up with the laziest of our ancestors.
Not only do humans have evolved brains that process and produce language and syntax, but we also can make a range of sounds and tones that we use to form hundreds of thousands of words. To make these sounds -- and talk -- humans use the same basic apparatus that chimps have: lungs, throat, voice box, tongue and lips.
As early humans faced new environmental challenges and evolved bigger bodies, they evolved larger and more complex brains. Large, complex brains can process and store a lot of information. That was a big advantage to early humans in their social interactions and encounters with unfamiliar habitats.
The lowest IQ score is 0/200, but nobody in recorded history has officially scored 0. Any result below 75 points is an indicator of some form of mental or cognitive impairment.
Adragon De Mello: IQ 400
In 1988, when Adragon De Mello graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a degree in computational mathematics at the age of 11, he was the youngest college graduate in the United States (a record he no longer holds).
Albert Einstein likely never took an IQ test but is estimated to have a 160 IQ—but even that can't stand up to these masterminds.
IQ tests are made to have an average score of 100. Psychologists revise the test every few years in order to maintain 100 as the average. Most people (about 68 percent) have an IQ between 85 and 115. Only a small fraction of people have a very low IQ (below 70) or a very high IQ (above 130).
Born during a lightning storm in 1856, Nikola Tesla went on to invent the Tesla coil and alternating current machinery. His estimated IQ scores range from 160 to 310 by different measures.
Humans have certainly had a profound effect on their environment, but our current claim to dominance is based on criteria that we have chosen ourselves. Ants outnumber us, trees outlive us, fungi outweigh us. Bacteria win on all of these counts at once.
Chimpanzees
We share 99 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, so it comes as no surprise that countless hours of research have been dedicated to understanding the intelligence and behavior of our sister species. This research has firmly established that chimps are one of the most intelligent species on earth.
The great apes are considered to be the smartest creatures after humans. Among them, orangutans stand out as being especially gifted with brain. They have a strong culture and system of communication, and many have been observed to use their tools in forest.
Worldwide there are roughly two new mutations for every one of the 3.5 billion base pairs in the human genome every year, says Hodgson. Which is pretty amazing - and makes it unlikely we will look the same in a million years.
But even if that common ancestor still existed, the fact that evolution is the result of both random mutation and a process of natural selection imposed by environmental conditions, means it's highly unlikely that it would ever retrace its steps in quite the same way.