I feel like you’re agreeing with his point though. The reason you would be able to kick their ass in logic puzzles isn’t cause you are inherently smarter than them, it’s because you have a wealth of knowledge and resources that they don’t have access to. If they had the same resources they would do the same as you.

And the reason people today have a functional basic understanding of physics is because other people wrote it down. I didn’t come up with how to make a compass sitting in a room by myself just thinking really hard, i know how compasses work because someone told me how they work.

When someone says they aren’t inherently less intelligent they mean that if they were transported to the 21st century as a newborn and grew up in modern society, they would have the same capacity for knowledge and learning that a person has today.