Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I recall in the days I hung out with drummers from Ghana, the ones I knew variously were native speakers of Twi, Ga, Ewe, and Fante. They each of them could speak to any of the others in that person's native language, as well as being able to speak to me in perfectly comprehensible, "fluent enough" English. (They would say things no native speaker would say, but I never recall them not being able to tell me what they meant or failing to understand what I meant.) Ninety percent of the population of Nigeria is at least bilingual, and many people speak more languages than that. Former NBA player Dikembe Mutumbo is "able to speak English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and five African languages." Hakeem Olajuwon is "in addition to English... fluent in French, Arabic, and the Nigerian languages of Yoruba and Ekiti." Speaking more than one language fluently is a great mental accomplishment, involving moving back and forth between different ways of seeing...

In response to one of my posts discussing IQ recently, a commenter contended that, for IQ to be truly measuring "general" intelligence, the test must be aimed at gauging abstract reasoning using symbols, otherwise what it measures would not really be general. I think this is exactly backwards. Abstract reasoning using symbols is a very specialized form of intelligence, highly developed in only one species (as far as we know), and, even then, engaged in as a primary life activity by a very small percentage of the members of that species. General intelligence is the intelligence that steers one around in day-to-day life, so that one avoids being hit by cars, doesn't eat poisonous things, stops arguing before making someone so angry that they beat or kill you, figures out how to get enough to eat, and so on. Think about it this way: You all know some Cal Tech or Harvard or MIT grad with a 4.0 average, about whom it is said, "He has trouble crossing the street by ...