Europeans and recent cognitive evolution

Household workshop for leather working (Wikicommons – Sovereign Hill Museum)

The high mean IQ of Europeans is relatively recent in origin, as is that of East Asians. Both of these “IQ plateaus” arose largely during the time of recorded history.

Until the eleventh century, mean IQ was relatively low throughout Europe, perhaps hovering in the low 90s. It then rose during late medieval and post-medieval times through population growth within the nascent middle class of merchants, yeoman farmers, and independent artisans.

That period saw a steady increase in understanding of probability, cause and effect, and another person’s perspective, whether real or hypothetical (Rinderman, 2018, pp. 49, 86-87; Oesterdiekhoff, 2012). A point was reached when intellectuals were no longer voices crying in the wilderness. They were now numerous enough to come together, interact with each other, and collaborate in projects of various sorts (Frost, 2019, pp. 175-176). Meanwhile, people were changing not only cognitively but also behaviorally: "Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving" (Clark, 2007, p. 166; see also Clark, 2009a; Clark, 2009b).

That evolution was driven by the high fertility of those people who knew how to exploit the opportunities of an expanding market economy. Their population growth was so great that they overwhelmed the niches available to them. Many had to find niches farther down the social ladder, with the eventual result that their lineages became predominant even within the lower class (Clark, 2009a).

The baby boom was especially strong among semi-rural artisans. Unlike the craft guilds of earlier times, these craftsmen and craftswomen worked within a dynamic environment that had few controls over prices, markets, or market entry:

In a typical medieval village, there had been one ironsmith, a few carpenters, and one or two masons; now a majority of households in a village would set up as framework knitters, silk-weavers, linen-makers, or metalworkers.

[…] They were not specialized craftsmen in life-trades with skills developed through long years of apprenticeship; they were semi-skilled family labour teams which set up in a line of business very quickly, adapting to shifts in market demand" (Seccombe, 1992, p. 182).

Their workforce was their household. In more successful households, the workers would marry earlier and have as many children as possible. In less successful ones, they would postpone marriage or never marry.

Such households were especially common in Ulster, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Brittany, Flanders, Alsace, Westphalia, Saxony, the Zurich uplands, the Piedmont, and Lombardy. Those regions also had the highest birth rates (Seccombe, 1992, pp. 205, 206, 217). Over time, that long-running baby boom would redefine Western Europe, not only demographically but also cognitively and behaviorally.

There should thus be a cognitive gradient as we go outward from Western Europe. This is indeed the case in Italy. Students from the north consistently outperform those from the south on the INVALSI, an annual exam in Italian schools. The difference is a little over half a standard deviation (Piffer and Lynn, 2022). Yes, the cause could be purely cultural, and this is a recurring problem when we try to tease apart genetic and cultural evolution. The two tend to run in the same direction.

In this case, however, the north-south difference in academic achievement is paralleled by a north-south gradient in alleles associated with educational attainment. That was the finding of a genomic study of 1,076 individuals whose grandparents were born in the same region of Italy. The data revealed “a clear north-south gradient, with central Italians occupying an intermediate position” (Piffer and Lynn, 2022). On average, northern Italians have higher cognitive ability, as measured by the PGS score, i.e., they are more likely to possess alleles associated with high educational attainment.

That north-south gradient corresponds to a post-medieval economic divergence. By the eighteenth century, the south was lagging far behind the north, its middle class still small and its economic relationships still structured by paternalism and familialism (De Rosa, 1979).

Such differences in recent cognitive evolution may explain a curious finding from a PGS study of Pittsburgh residents: cognitive ability is positively correlated with Amerindian admixture among non-Hispanic European Americans (Fuerst et al., 2021). Keep in mind that the native peoples of the U.S. intermixed mostly with early settlers of British, Dutch, or French origin. There was much less intermixture with later immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The correlation may thus be due not to Amerindian admixture per se but rather to variation in cognitive ability among European immigrants to the United States.

Europeans and Africans

All of that leads to an interesting corollary: the IQ gap used to be smaller between Europeans and Black Africans. On the one hand, mean European IQ probably remained in the low 90s until late medieval times. On the other hand, mean IQ may have been in the upper 80s among those dark-skinned Africans who were closest, and best known, to Europeans of earlier times. The Nubians, for instance, had reached a high level of material culture, social complexity and State formation—so much so that they were able to conquer Egypt and rule it for a while.

A smaller IQ gap would be consistent with an observation by Jason Malloy. He noted that blacks were often described in the ancient world as having large penises but not as being less intelligent (Frost, 2009, comment #2; see Clarke, 1996; Goldenberg, 2003, p. 190; Thompson, 1989, p. 210, n. 85). Indeed, I have found only two Greco-Roman texts in which the author disparaged them for lack of intelligence. One of them, allegedly by the Greek physician Galen (129-210 AD), is referenced by the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 AD):

We have seen that Negroes are in general characterized by levity, excitability, and great emotionalism. They are found eager to dance whenever they hear a melody. They are everywhere described as stupid.

[…] Al-Masudi undertook to investigate the reason for the levity, excitability, and emotionalism in Negroes, and attempted to explain it. However, he did no better than to report, on the authority of Galen and Ya'qub b. Ishaq al-Kindi, that the reason is a weakness of their brains which results in a weakness of their intellect.

The Muqaddimah Chapter I, Fourth Prefatory Discussion

No such statement appears in any of Galen’s known works, at least not in any that have survived. It may thus be a false attribution.

The other text is a parable told by the desert monk Arsenius (350-445 AD). It seems to have begun as a humorous anecdote that was later given a Christian message (i.e., by refusing to repent, a foolish sinner continues to sin and thus makes his burden of sin even heavier):

The voice led him to a certain place and showed him an Ethiopian cutting wood and making a great pile. He struggled to carry it but in vain. But instead of taking some off, he cut more wood which he added to the pile. He did this for a long time. Arsenius 33. (Ward, 1975)

Note: The word “Ethiopian” meant “Black African” in the ancient world. It did not refer to the country that now exists in the Horn of Africa.

Both texts come from Late Antiquity—the period between Classical Antiquity (when blacks were uncommon in the Mediterranean and the Middle East) and the Islamic Era (when they were much more common and increasingly from societies deeper within sub-Saharan Africa). It was also during Late Antiquity that black skin first became equated with slave status in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, not because most slaves were black (although a growing proportion were) but rather because most blacks were slaves (Goldenberg, 2003, pp. 155-156, 168-174).

Conclusion

Over the past millennium, European cognitive evolution has been driven by those people who knew how to exploit the opportunities of the expanding market economy—merchants, yeoman farmers, and independent artisans. The key factor was not what they actually did, but rather their ability to identify and seize business opportunities, which in turn required the ability to negotiate, plan, calculate, and process numerical and textual data. Such abilities had not always been valued. A millennium ago, the nobility scorned bookish pursuits, with most nobles being illiterate and innumerate. The same was true for the peasantry, who made up the bulk of the population. The nascent middle class was a very small middle.

With the pacification of social relations, and a consequent expansion of the market economy, that class would steadily grow in number (Frost, 2022). This was especially so in Western Europe, and even more so in regions where household workshops were the mainstay of economic activity. It would be interesting to find out whether the inhabitants of those regions are today cognitively different from those of surrounding regions. One such region was Brittany, which today boasts the highest level of academic success of all regions in France (Rouillard, 2020).  In other regions, however, family workshops often gave way to factories that would attract workers from far and wide. Any regional specificities would have been erased.

A cognitive map of Europe should show an IQ “plateau” that slopes upward irregularly to the north and west. One irregularity would be the Finns, whose polygenic score is unusually high and who consistently receive high PISA scores, even in comparison to those of the Swedish minority in Finland: “Indeed, this minority, which are on average wealthier, healthier, and better educated than the Finns score lower than the Finns on every PISA subtest in all years of assessment” (Dutton and Kirkegaard, 2014, p. 5; Piffer, 2019). Perhaps cognitive evolution was stronger among the Finns. Or perhaps it began from a higher starting point. Or perhaps it ended later and has not reversed itself to the same extent.

To a large degree, the IQ plateau of Europe is relatively recent in origin, as is the IQ plateau of East Asia (Unz, 2013). The past is indeed another country.

References

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