system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why does our brain have such a large capacity when humans just 10,000 years ago were looking for prey rather than contemplating quantum mechanics?

In terms of evolution, what gave our brains such a (what seems to be) huge capacity to become smarter and remember more and more things?
 
I understand there are social reasons: the birth of reason, academic communities, the Enlightenment etc. But these all happened in a matter of hundreds of years whereas evolution generally takes hundreds of thousands of years before a significant biological change can take place no? Why is our brain not less equipped to handle the huge amounts of knowledge and intelligence required to advance humankind nowadays?

Also, would it be conceivable that we might hit a ceiling where, objectively, we could develop further but the biology of our brains would hold us back?
gpt
I think what you're describing is called the ratchet effect -- because we have culture that is passed down across generations, each new generation doesn't have to start over each time but can pick up where the previous one left off.  If you want to be a physicist you can just read some books and take some classes and get caught up on what has taken your predecessors thousands of years to discover, analyze, and codify.  You aren't any smarter than those ancestors of thousands of years ago, you just have a massive head start.  Or in gaming terms, your ancestors left you enough saved games so that you don't have to start all the way back at the beginning of the level, you can just zip to the last completed checkpoint.