I am interested in taking ideas from historical costuming and applying them to modern garments (“history bounding”) and something that keeps jumping out at me is how smart people in the past were, especially regular, working people. In modern times, people tend to act like people were stupid just because modern medicine and science didn’t exist, but if you study enough to understand some of the reality of historical people’s lives, there are some really nifty solutions. It makes me think a lot about “intelligence”, and how limited our understanding of it is if we are so unable to think of pre-modern people as intelligent.

That’s a big tangent to your comment, but it’s ultimately heading in the same direction. I’m also jazzed to see cognitive science continue to increase its understanding of non-human intelligence; it’s really cool to see what we can discover when we stop projecting ourselves so hard onto other creatures.