Posted: Nov 22, 2019 8:21 pm
Svartalf wrote:so a gorilla was smarter than Lucy?
My way of answering this would be 'potentially smarter'.
As you know from humans, give a child a rich and varied environment and lots of opportunities to learn, then they may reach the full potential of their intelligence while a child of similar potential in a poorly stimulated, disinterested, uneducational environment may end up sub-normal intelligence.
We don't know how complex the australopithecine world was, how rich their social interactions were, but even if there were more interesting ways they could use their minds, their brains could only manage a metabolic rate of synaptic activities at about half the rate of gorilla. That's pretty substantial.