As far as I know humans with the same sort of brains as your brain and my brain have existed for 100,000's of years, perhaps as long as 2 million years.

They did not go to the moon. They did not make mechanisms, they did not make pottery, they did not smelt iron, they did not press shapes onto clay and leave it in houses that burned down, they did not have houses.

All of that has come in the last 12,000 years. I think that there are people in the Amazon today who could not write or read a word, could not drive a car or solve an equation or argue a case or compose an algorithm who are as intelligent as me, or you, or more. I think that people like that have existed for more than a million years.

So if they were so smart, why didn't they go to the moon?

>So if they were so smart, why didn't they go to the moon?

Because the requisite amount of iterations for their/our level of intelligence had not yet occurred. After a 100 billion lifetimes or so we got there.

Presumably entities with greater intelligence would require fewer iterations.