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Firstly, I don't know if you can assess intelligence from ancient populations.
We can go to West Africa or Haiti today and see 'ok these people aren't that smart', test genes and compare with other populations today. We can draw upon all kinds of data and observations from real countries, real peoples that exist today.
But 3000 years ago? 8000 years ago? Why was the Bronze Age collapse so good for IQ, such that it took us ages to recover to that peak level of intellect? Were the Sea People the true bringers of enrichment and diversity? We just don't know. Who can say what we're really graphing here, there could be a million confounders we don't know about.
Secondly, call me high-time preference but I'm interested in the here and now. So what if Meds, Hittites and ancient Egyptians had masterful civilizations while the Germanics were carving ugly wooden faces? Ancient Egypt is gone now. The Greece of Plato and Aristotle is gone now. Rome is gone. Byzantium is gone. We see ruins and read stories about peoples who don't exist anymore, places that lost their relevance. We can construct stories about how the dirty Asiatics brought Christianity with them to displace proper European religion but it's all just conjecture, we weren't there at the time. Our knowledge of this period is vanishingly small.
Let's focus on not becoming ancient history for someone else to ponder over.
once you analyzed lots of phenotype-genotypes for moderns you can apply these models for ancient, and analyzing population averages is simpler in some aspects than getting a good score for individual: for individual, a trait would depend on non-linear combinations and rare alleles; for comparing between populations, these aren't significant, because a population cannot reliably continue lucky non-linear combinations (we however do in in agriculture with f1 seeds and cloning).
How verifiable is it, though? Where are we getting DNA from, are they outliers trapped in peat bog pits or something? The article says they just found basically anonymous DNA samples from across Eurasia, over thousands and thousands of years. We can't know that this is a balanced sample.
What if they have X genetics and we accurately capture that but some epigenetics are activated/deactivated at the time? As far as I can determine, the methylation pattern is more easily lost (and they didn't cover it anyway).
I like my science as concrete and provable as possible. This is dangerously abstract. Abstraction is fine if we had some real Indo-European farmers or Neolithics to talk to but since we don't, standards for validity should be kept high.
Not much verifiable. There should be much more work comparing new data (hopefully more detailed and nuanced than this) to see whether there shifts make sense with what we know from other means. There is no expectation why samples would be unbiased but this is problem for all archeology, not just DNA.
How then do you like hypothesis that we are smarter than Homo erectus? It's not something that can be tested. It's pure speculation, right? Heck, how we can be even be sure Indo-Europeans existed? It's just deep extrapolation from existing languages on much murkier ground.
Skull size is a pretty clear signal for Erectus, I'm happy with skull size variations implying intelligence difference, ceteris paribus. I'm happy with a broad trend of rising intelligence under selection pressure. I do believe in evolution and genetics. But I don't believe that we can precisely chart IQ rising and falling over thousands of years like OP's charts suggest. The level of confidence is too high.
DNA methylation is absolutely relevant to working out which genes are expressed, it's a way of determining epigenetics.
The human body is a very complex piece of machinery that we don't fully understand. This article suggests that the heart can store memories (which are transferred with transplants) which I didn't believe in at all prior to this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987719307145
When dealing with such a complex system, with many facets barely known to us, we should be cautious before reaching conclusions - especially if there's no way to test them.
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Crises, especially ones with a large risk of death tend to drive evolution. Who got to survive after a collapse? Smart people with a higher time preference survived because they were the ones prepared to survive the collapse and to rebuild afterwards. The ones who die are the ones who are dumb and therefore do stupid things to kill themselves, are unable to plan ahead, and lack a solid work ethic.
Now the reverse is true of High Civilization like Greece and Rome. We say it ourselves — good times make weak men. The Greeks and Romans used slaves for everything and had a pretty decent welfare state in Rome itself. The chief problem for Rome was a large class of unemployed in Rome who had to be entertained. In such a city, one could live a comfortable life and never have to break a sweat doing anything productive. And so if you were lazy, stupid, and uninterested in working or getting educated, not a problem. And so while those people die quickly in a collapse, they didn’t really suffer all that much in Rome. So those types would definitely lower the IQ of classic civilization.
Have you lived or witnessed close by a collapse? From my experience with the fall of the communism it is not the type of person that you described that thrived.
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You mean, smart people with a lower time preference.
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Doesn't this risk being a just-so story? It's not clear to me why a civilisational collapse or dark age would necessarily favour smart people with a higher time preference - you can probably argue just as easily that it would favour impulsive and violent people, because short-term aggression is more valuable in a time of instability. Long-term planning and building is more valuable in a time stable enough for generational or intergenerational investment to bear fruit.
Crises tend to favour fast strategies - and surely you could argue that fast strategies will value IQ less than slow strategies, and so you might expect average IQ to go down through a crisis.
To be clear, I'm not asserting that this is definitely the case. It just seems at least as plausible to me as the theory that crises favour people with higher IQs. I have no strong opinion on how crises influence the genetics of IQ.
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