I believe that people were smarter when we were in sync with nature and respected this earth as our Mother; the main souce as a spiritual, physical, and food provider. As time progressed and humans began to think outside of the box and invent machines to take shortcuts or make long winded processes shorter, or more convenient and less tedious, the more carnal knowledge of how to do things the old primal way are lost over a long period of time. I think that mankind as a whole is naïve to the fact that we are actually retarded in the sense that in the twentyfirst century we get our info from books, high speed internet, radio, and television and we utilize these mediums mostly for entertainment instead of enlightenment, therefore society dumbs us down by bombarding the masses with advertisements and dole out only the tidbits of info they want us to know. For example, not even aided with the new age technology of today we haven't figured out how stonehenge or the pyramids were built hundreds of years ago, and those who lived long ago are looked upon as a primal or "uncivilized" to the western civilizations of today.
Indegenous peoples of what we know today as the Americas had working irrigations systems and had mapped out the celestial bodies in space while people in the caucus mountains were still trying to figure out how to strike fire. In summation, humans were more resourceful in the age of innosence when everyone in the heirarchy worked towards common goals that were beneficial to society as a whole and now that every individual is out for their own personal gain we live in a world capitalism is king. Who profits? Certaintly not the other living creatures like wildlife, plants & insects who are directly connected to these environments (where man hasn't finished raping and stripping natural resources for their own motives propelled by greed) ultimately cannot adapt fast enough to succeed in surviving for future generations.