This poor record of achievement has led scholars to speculate that the internal structure of the brains of these Sapiens was probably different from ours. They looked like us, but their cognitive abilities – learning, remembering, communicating – were far more limited. Teaching such ancient Sapiens to speak English, persuading them of the truth of Christian dogma, or getting them to understand the theory of evolution would probably have been hopeless undertakings. Conversely, we would have had a very hard time learning their communication system and way of thinking.
I feel like this has less to do with their brains and more due to the fact that they didn’t yet have the tools to pass down their knowledge to future generations — so each generation builds upon the discoveries of the previous one. Without this, every person has to learn from scratch. There’s no a priori knowledge to build upon.
