Correspondence Counting

By one way of thinking, our prehistoric ancestors were just as smart as we are. They had the same brain structure as today’s humans, capable of solving problems with the same complexity as today’s best thinkers.

That is, they would be capable of solving any problems they could understand. They were equipped with the same hardware, giving them an innate ability to reason and solve problems.

It’s today’s software that’s so different.

Hundreds of thousands of years of modern human existence has provided us with a system for passing down knowledge from one generation to the next.

Prehistoric people certainly learned from their parents and the people they were around every day. Knowledge of all sorts of things human beings aren’t born knowing was passed down through generations, like whether a certain type of plant was poisonous or the best way to kill a mammoth.

Over time, more and more knowledge was passed down. The more likely the knowledge was to be useful to a large number of people, t…