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John_Maxwell_IV comments on How minimal is our intelligence? - Less Wrong
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If the gene for the synthesis of docosahexaenoic acid arose 80kya, and the current interglacial period began 12kya, that still leaves four thousand years between the end of the glacial period and the beginning of city-based civilization, which, keep in mind, is a long time.
If the civilization developments followed within a hundred years or so of the necessary biological and environmental factors coming into place, I wouldn't be so skeptical that our intelligence already exceeded the minimum necessary to produce those developments. But we already had domesticated grazing animals thousands of years before the foundation of Ur, and grains earlier than that. Don't forget that when we're dealing with cultural rather than biological evolution, a millenium is no longer a relative eyeblink.
Humans are relatively conformist, and we often have a hard time translating abstract/revolutionary ideas in to practice. It seems likely that many humans had ideas for things resembling civilization, or things that could've lead to the development of a civilization, before the first actual civilization, in the same way more people dream about starting businesses than actually start businesses.
Paul Graham seems to think that local culture plays a huge role in startup success. Now consider that even the cultures Paul Graham considers pretty bad are still American city cultures, and America has a reputation for individualism, rags-to-riches success, etc. and that's all on a foundation of enlightenment values related to progress, questioning authority, and so on. And we've got a long and storied history of society changing on a large scale, within our lifetimes even.
So yeah, stagnant cultures are not necessarily being held back by lack of intelligence. It could be the standard akrasia/agency-failure type stuff that we're still struggling with today. (Arguably something similar is going on for peoples' failure to appreciate the possible magnitude of human-level AGI--it's just way too bizarre relative to historical norms for most of us to take it seriously.)