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Notes -
I don't think this necessarily follows, unless you want to look at Europe after Rome left, and declare the Europeans must have naturally crazy low intelligence as well (or, I suppose you could argue that the difference can be made up in
1000 years).Based on the my observation of the middle-ages, it seems pretty reasonable that the former territories to struggle amongst themselves in a series of constantly escalating conflicts until a distaste for war is (quite literally) beat into the local culture enough to outweigh the natural human drive to see your out-group killed (at least enough to stop fighting with people within a few hundred km). This seems to take several hundred years (it could possibly be faster with increased communication speed, but the power vacuum in Africa is only 60-80 years old, so I'm not willing to write off the theory yet).
It's only at that point that you can build infrastructure and complicated supply lines that complex societies are built on. Before that, I would only expect high-intelligence to result in more efficient killing.
Alternatively a single victor/foreign power can come in and dominate (your classic pax X-ana period). The point is more that stability seems to come from either subjugation or deep cultural changes that seem to be orthogonal to intelligence.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're entirely wrong, but I think looking at the state of an area for a single 50-100 year period is a horrible argument about the IQ of the humans that live there.
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