Yes indeed. Adaptability and intelligence are enabling factors. The human capabilities of making diverse stone tools, making cloth and fire had been sufficient to settle in other climate zones. Modern humans have many more capabilities: Agriculture, transportation, manipulating of any physical matter from atomic scales to earth surrounding infrastructures; controlling energies from quantum mechanical condensation up to fusion bomb explosions; information storage, communication, computation, simulation, automation up to narrow AI.

Change of human intelligence and adaptability do not account for this huge rise in capabilities and skills over the recent 20,000 years. The rise of capabilities is a cultural evolutionary process. Leonardo da Vinci was the last real universal genius of humanity. Capabilities diversified and expanded exponentially since exceeding the human brain capacity by magnitudes. Hundreds of new knowledge domains developed. The more domains an AI masters the more power has it.