The Hunt for Prehistoric Intelligence
by Michael G. Heller
Published in Social Science Files, July 1, 2025
Village school by Jan Steen, 1670 Netherlands
“The evolution of persistence hunting would have involved the evolution of tracking skills. The evolution of tracking would have involved the evolution of the cognitive abilities to engage in scientific reasoning. … Trackers constantly run simulations of reality in their heads. This is what gave humans the ability to predict evolving situations and formulate strategies. … This may be one of the most fundamental attributes that distinguish humans from other animals.”1
The past and future of Social Science Files
Preamble
What the nine lives of society reveal over the entire course of history is that societies differ typologically from one another in how they make their decisions of governance.
In the first society, governance was unstructured. Individuals demonstrated their worth in decision making by the quality of their decisions. This was a function of experience-based knowledge and cognitive ability (intelligence), but also inherited qualities of personality that were manifested in differentiated communication ability, persuasiveness, and assertiveness, and which combined with other biological features of individuals, including testosterone-induced status-seeking, and physical stature.
In decision-making behaviours, the differences between individuals that are easiest to assess historically are those that are measurable and enable a retrospective view. These are the differences of sex. I start by building a composite picture of why women had considerable indirect influence in governance, but hardly ever became society leaders.
Universal intelligence differences
Some of the abilities commonly studied in contemporary research on intelligence — such as mathematics, science and reading — are not directly empirically relevant to prehistoric conditions. Nevertheless, among early humans there were prehistoric equivalents to these activities — abilities in the normal course of life to ‘calculate’ quantities and spatial dimensions, to ‘systematise’ knowledge through observation and experimentation in order to test the validity of a hunch or hypothesis, and the ‘comprehension’ of prevailing means of communication. Indeed, some of the most useful contemporary interpretations of data on abilities for mathematics, science and reading do refer to these pre-literate or hunter-gatherer capabilities as ‘yardsticks’.
The main findings, where there is most agreement among the studies, and where the data continues to corroborate the results of research undertaken in Scotland in the 1930s and 40s2, are as follows. On average, men and women have equal intelligence as measured by standard IQ. Nevertheless, “tests of intelligence are carefully written so that there will be no average overall difference between the sexes”.3 Furthermore, to quote the title of a recent study — “The sexes do not differ in general intelligence, but they do in some specifics”.4 Also noteworthy is that males show larger variance than females in most traits, i.e. men deviate from the average at both high and low levels in comparative measures of height, body mass, brain volume, personality, intelligence.5
According to Diane F. Halpern and Jonathan Wai6, the general findings, repeated in many studies, are that males usually perform better in visual-spatial tasks, in rotation of multi-dimensional representations, in fluid intelligence that measures perception of environmental variations, and in abstract mathematical and scientific reasoning. Men have superior motor skills for muscle movements that optimise precision and energy conservation, e.g. aiming, and spatial working memory. Women excel in verbal intelligence, reading skills, and complex writing requiring language comprehension and selective attention. In these specific contexts, females display significantly better memory and perceptual speed. The conclusion — although there is no difference in general intelligence, women process written and verbal information more effectively, and men have advantages in the processing of visual and spatial information.7
Nevertheless, with the possible exception of ability in spatial perception, these differences are not set in stone. Intelligence may well be 50% inherited, but it can be improved through its exercise and application. The results of intelligence tests tend to vary with levels of education and the age of participants. Noting that improvements can occur over time, Halpern and Wai write “it does not seem that biology is limiting intelligence”.8 Girls receive higher grades in every school subject, possibly because they are more self-disciplined. Notwithstanding, they are not always encouraged to enter the professions where science and mathematics are required. It is reasonable to assume that parent preferences and other environmental factors will affect how much effort girls make in particular subject areas. Another factor for which there exists evidence is that women underestimate their capabilities, whereas men overestimate them.9 Feminists have long argued, often justifiably, that many measured differences in intelligence in comparison with men reflect a process of socialisation.
As this summary demonstrates, on balance men and women are level-pegged in intelligence. However, there exist important domains of relative strength and relative weakness in cognitive ability. What I want to focus on are the differentiations that matter most decisively to divisions of labour in a Stone Age environment, or, as continues to be the case even today, in proxy-primitive forager populations.
Applied intelligence in prehistory
One of the reasons why human group societies remained ‘primitive’ for nearly 200k years (until the agricultural revolution revolutionised governance and social life) was that their time, energy, and attention were so absorbed in the practises of hunting. Acquisition of food was the immediate priority for survival. Decisions, learning, and innovation, though they also applied to foraged plants, centred mainly on hunting. Subsistence strategies that prioritised meat acquisition did make calorific sense in the short run. Meat is a quicker and denser source of energy. Because of the greater dangers of hunting, and the requirements for rapid reactions, stamina and strength across large distances, hunting success was also a source of prestige and status.
This is not say that gathering and carrying large harvested loads over distances in areas inhabited by predators and with children in tow did not also demand physical strength, stamina, and cognitive abilities. Yet, in socioeconomic terms, the focus on hunting meant that the principal division of labour around which all else revolved was between the mainly male occupation of hunting and the mainly female occupations of gathering and child care. Though plant food was essential to life, its collection and processing was lower in the priority list of decisions, learning, and innovation. In the discussions about gathering plants the decisions were rarely urgent, the learning was gradual, and there was less scope for innovation. Of the many types of labour required and planned for on a daily basis, hunting occupied a revered position. Therefore, the forms of individual intelligence that were invariably and routinely prioritised during the Stone Age were those directly relevant to — mostly male — hunting.
Female intelligence was essential in activities that were auxiliary to hunting. Women have distinct aptitudes for foraging. The one most often mentioned in the literature is the dynamic “memory” required to remember where particular plants grow and their seasonality. In this, women excel. Men have better spatial orientation ability for larger range hunting. Yet since none of the intelligence differences of sex are enormous or dichotomous, women had adequate spatial skills and intuitions needed for the mental mapping of the comparatively smaller range territories when locating food sources. Women may have superior ‘trichromatic’ ability to detect changes in the colours of the plants they sought.10 Though men are marginally more competent in abstract scientific reasoning, the ‘science’ of plants required that females acquire expertise for identifying and synthesising a monumental variety of plants, to avoid poisons and to process food efficaciously. Each plant has its idiosyncrasies of nutrition, location, growth, harvesting, processing, storage, and consumption. Plants were also vital materials (e.g. rope, thread, cane) for storage, fishing, hunting, and shelter.
However, insofar as intelligence evolves in each individual over a lifetime, and insofar as each individual contributes their specks of cognition to the rationality of social living, the demands of hunting might initially have had more impact on cognitive capacity than the coupling and grouping processes. My main argument remains that group decision making made the primary causal contribution to prehistoric intellectual and communication competencies. Yet it seems clear that the pressured conditions and dangers of hunting process (and its corollary, warfare) were almost as important.
I slightly exaggerate the role of hunting so as to justify a focus on the pressured and faster-evolving male characteristics of ‘fluid intelligence’ for calculating, systematising, and comprehension. The activity of hunting animals entailed a violence skills set similar to the one employed when confronting humans who posed a threat. Risks were also run when ‘hunting’ for territories that might offer new places of habitation and foraging. The ‘faster’ evolution I refer to is also an assumption based on the physical and psychological exigencies of hunting, which like warfare, exerted a compulsion to adapt, select and vary ‘on the hoof’ or ‘on the fly’. The cognitive advantages that men had for hunting were long range visual-spatial and rotational calculation capabilities and working memories, and the motor skills for making and utilising the various tools of hunting. Compared with women, men learn these skills faster and more easily. Men are generally better at finding optimal routes and learning navigation skills. From an early age, men show more aptitude for manipulating visual three-dimensions that take account of the length, breadth, and depth of objects and images.11 These cognitive differences derive from the engagement of different regions and systems of the brain. Furthermore, similar contrasts are found in motor skills and mechanical reasoning abilities to construct and manipulate tools, which are all notably easier for males.
David C. Geary gives an expert summary of the field in all these dimensions:
Sex differences in … representational and memory skills have been studied for many decades and the pattern is complex. Men typically outperform women in navigating in the environment and on tests that involve the representation and mental rotation of images in three-dimensional space, whereas women have an advantage in remembering the location of objects. … [A] consistent pattern of sex differences has emerged for spatial abilities that are related to the different reproductive and foraging activities of men and women in traditional societies. These competencies include the ability to generate mental representations of the large-scale physical environment, which is related to skill at navigating within this environment; the ability to mentally manipulate or transform three-dimensional representations, which may engage the same cognitive systems used to represent and navigate in three-dimensional space or which may be useful for tool construction; and the ability to remember the location of specific objects in the environment. … Although much remains to be learned … the existing studies are consistent with a stronger evolutionary elaboration of the brain and cognitive systems that support mechanical reasoning and tool use in men than in women. … [Also] men’s advantages in spatial abilities and their greater interest in things (vs. people) contribute to the sex differences in some mathematical domains.12
COMING SOON, ALSO UNDER THE HEADING OF ‘TYPE 1 SOCIETY’
Personality, status-seeking and testosterone effects, the 200k-old forager division of labour, child care and attachment theory, the father figure in politics and law (Daddy effects), a theory of exclusivity in coupling, incest that requires rules, ‘the governance’.
Mental Arithmetic in the Public School by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky, 1895 Russia
For many reasons, including reader feedback, I often make changes to the online edition after publication. Go to the colourful website to check the latest version. You can give me your feedback just by replying to the post or by emailing me at HellerFiles@gmail.com
FOOTNOTES
Louis Liebenberg, The Origin of Science: The Evolutionary Roots of Scientific Reasoning and its Implications for Tracking Science, Cyber Tracker 2021
“The one country that has tested its entire nation’s intelligence is Scotland — it did so in 1932 and again in 1947 as part of the Scottish Mental Surveys. Every 11-year-old in the country was tested on the same IQ test: both samples included well over 70,000 people. The data were recently rediscovered and analysed with reference to sex differences. The result, in both samples, was that the average IQ score of girls and boys was exactly the same. But it’s not quite so simple. Just looking at the average hides two consistent sex differences. The first is that there are differences in more specific abilities: women tend to do better than men on verbal measures, and men tend to outperform women on tests of spatial ability; these small differences balance out so that the average general score is the same. The second is that there is a difference in variability: males tend to be over-represented at the very high and the very low levels of intelligence. This was found most clearly in the Scottish data.” Stuart Ritchie, Intelligence: All That Matters, John Murray Learning 2015:68
Diane F. Halpern and Jonathan Wai, ‘Sex Differences in Intelligence’, in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook Of Intelligence, Cambridge University Press 2020:319
Matthew R. Reynolds, Daniel B. Hajovsky, Jacqueline M. Caemmerer, ‘The sexes do not differ in general intelligence, but they do in some specifics’ in Intelligence, Volume 92, May–June 2022 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2022.101651
Marco Del Giudice, ‘Measuring Sex Differences and Similarities’, in D. P. VanderLaan and W. I. Wong (eds.) Gender and Sexuality Development: Contemporary Theory and Research, Springer 2022:16 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84273-4_1#DOI.
As Geary notes, the “consistent finding is that there are more boys and men at the high and low ends of intelligence”. He cites a study that found that though “there was only a small male advantage for average intelligence … again there were more brothers than sisters at the high and low ends. For the top 2% of scores, brothers outnumbered sisters 2 to 1.” David C. Geary, Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (3rd edition), American Psychological Association 2021:425
Diane F. Halpern and Jonathan Wai, ‘Sex Differences in Intelligence’, in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook Of Intelligence, Cambridge University Press 2020:passim
Matthew R. Reynolds, Daniel B. Hajovsky, Jacqueline M. Caemmerer, ‘The sexes do not differ in general intelligence, but they do in some specifics’ in Intelligence, Volume 92, May–June 2022 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2022.101651
Diane F. Halpern and Jonathan Wai, ‘Sex Differences in Intelligence’, in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook Of Intelligence, Cambridge University Press 2020:336
Aljoscha C. Neubauer and Gabriela Hofer ‘Self- and Other-Estimates of Intelligence’ in Robert J. Sternberg, The Cambridge Handbook Of Intelligence, Cambridge University Press 2020
Hurlbert, Anya C. et al., ‘Biological components of sex differences in color preference’ in Current Biology, Volume 17, Issue 16, 2007; Abramov, I., Gordon, J., Feldman, O. et al. Sex and vision II: color appearance of monochromatic lights. Biol Sex Differ 3, 21 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/2042-6410-3-21; David C. Geary, Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences, American Psychological Association 2021:411
David C. Geary, Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (3rd edition), American Psychological Association 2021:407-409
ibid:407, 418, 428. See also multiple contributions in Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes eds. Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, Springer 2021