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Notes -
I think the second half of your first paragraph has a bunch of issues.
I don't think it logically follows that the smartest would be the ones to leave first, especially in the context of simple, pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer societies. It could very easily be that the ones who left first were the least aggressive, and thus least likely to defend their territory. Inuit folklore mention the Dorset and state that their response to outsiders was simply to flee. I don't see why that wouldn't have been the case during the first human migration from Africa. I'd judge the argument that leaving Africa in the first place is a sign of intelligence to be false. Indeed, I think the low aggression hypothesis is actually more likely, given that there are experts who argue that drought in Africa is what first spurred the out-of-Africa migrations. That's a point in favour of aggressiveness/docility being the distinction between stayers and leavers, as conflict over increasingly scarce resources would have been inevitable.
Also, the first migrations out of Africa were fundamentally different than any that came after, as the original out of Africa population was traveling through areas where there were no Sapiens Sapiens, only Denisovans and Neanderthal. Once the first group leaves and is in the way, it becomes significantly less simple to push them out and then migrate, as you have to go through potentially(probably) hostile societies to do so. The first group to leave was incredibly lucky, and if they had been the second group due to minor changes in inter-tribe politics or random chance, they might never have made it out.
Finally, some parts of Africa are close to the Middle East and some are not. Any group that ended up in Southern Africa simply wasn't going to leave, and that is entirely circumstance and has nothing to do with any of their group characteristics. There's no reason the smartest humans 70,000 years ago couldn't have been denied the opportunity to colonize the world due to their location.
The Sahara was unlikely to have been a barrier to the first humans leaving, either. It has cyclical wet/dry periods, and it seems that a wet period ended ~70,000 years ago, which is right in line with the out-of-Africa migration that led humans into Eurasia and beyond. I find it more intuitive, given this fact, to suggest that the drought and desertification of the Sahara region was the impetus, and that it only became a hurdle for migration after the humans had already left Africa. On top of that, the Sans of Southern Africa have been successfully living in the Kalahari desert for 20,000+ years, despite scoring even lower on IQ tests(55 on average!) than other African groups.
With all that in mind, I find it very unlikely(I'd posit 95% confidence that this is the case) that the intellectual differences between Sub-Saharan Africans and non-African populations are the result of genetic differences that existed before humans migrated out of Africa. Any such differences are probably the result of selection pressures after the fact.
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