Yes, people back then were as smart or dumb as we are. They didn't already invent all the stuff we have. But the had the same capabilities of organization. Ancient Greece was most likely not the first democracy. Possibly not even then first in Greece.
This is what I just don't understand about the European middle ages, or at least the popular depictions thereof.
But also the bewilderment of "how could they do this 4000 years ago???". Imagine you didn't have a day job, you didn't have to or couldn't do things for your immediate survival - food is growing, stores are full, everything is fine.
I remember as a child I loved to build canals and the like at the beach, or dam off rivers, or play with clay. Turning play into something useful - like drainage - sounds like it'd come natural to a lot of people. Turning boredom into inventions to make your life easier as well. It's probably one of the main thing that differentiated human from primates, finding solutions to problems.
Most of the "but how could they do this" questions concern moving large rocks hundreds of miles without roads or wheels, or building slender towers supported on intricate networks of arches without engineering calculations or even Newtonian physics. That's a step up from everyday solutions to practical problems.
For the projects for the average peasant to fill their spare time the amazed reaction tends to be the opposite: "how could they not see fit to extend their tiny hovels, build separate quarters for the livestock, put floors on their muddy paths or consider tidying up and not literally shitting on their own doorsteps. Though much of that explanation lies with vastly overestimating how much spare time people who had to make virtually everything they used and owed service to more powerful people actually had...
They had the same rough cognitive abilities potential, but isn't it possible that something non-genetic - such as the ability to read and write - plays a significant enough part in raising the "total intelligence of a society" that the times before it was common for more than a tiny minority of people to read or write the average effective intelligence really was lower, significantly enough to make "people back then were as smart or dumb as we are" not true?
Possibly even on an individual level - that learning to read and write may allow each of us to become more "clever" than if we hadn't. But especially on a societal level, where the ability to read and write has meant that education isn't (as) bottlenecked as when the only learning possible was direct from someone who had learned directly from someone else - even before communication technologies like phones and the internet, the ability to write down scientific research and send it to other non-local researchers sped up a lot of scientific progress. And while people of today may not have an intrinsic better ability of understanding specific things than people of 500 years ago, people in politics do study historical politics (both recent and ancient) to learn from and form new ideas around, so while it's not quite as easy as science to see trees of research where learning/understanding X led to the possibility of also discovering Y, it's surely equally plausible in social subjects that without as much written thinking on the subject, people were also less capable of thinking about it to today's levels?
And that's just thinking about reading and writing, the first thing that popped into my mind. Maybe there's lots of other things that had significant effects too? Maybe diet / available food either had a direct impact on cognitive abilities, or had an impact on lowering the average energy people had leading to lower cognitive function? Etc.
