How smart are humans, really?

I've been thinking about why so many intellectual tasks humans perform are so hard for us, particularly compared to computers. In the past we compared ourselves to other animals and decided we are clearly superior to them intellectually. There's really no contest between humans and any other animals in terms of problem solving and physical creativity.

Nowadays we have something else to compare ourselves to, computers. A computer with the right program can do many things fantastically better than we can, such as perform millions of complex calculations in just a few seconds. On the other hand if you present a computer program with a problem or situation it's not designed to deal with, it's typical response is to either crash or just produce useless output.

Nevertheless it seems likely that, eventually, we will learn how our brains work and figure out how to build a truly intelligent machine, or Artificial General Intelligence. So then the question is, compared to all possible intelligences how smart are we, really?

Some things that seem like they should be fairly obvious have proved to be complete mysteries to us for a long time. It seems to take enormous effort for us to make seemingly small incremental intellectual steps. For example it took mathematicians hundreds, even thousands of years to develop techniques and theories that you can teach to a student in a few hours. If these techniques are so simple they can be taught in a few hours, why did it take many thousands of mathematicians many hundreds of years to figure it out?

The conclusion I've come to is that, objectively speaking in the grand scheme of things, we are incredibly dim. Let's establish the lowest individual intellectual threshold for developing a technological civilization and call it 1.0 on the scale. For a species to achieve advanced mathematics and science it needs enough individuals with intelligence quotient 1.0 or higher. How smart are we on that scale?

Well, in evolutionary terms we only just barely developed a technological society. In the grand sweep of the development of our species and life on earth, we practically did it yesterday. Since I think we'd expect a species to develop technology soon after becoming capable of doing so, in fact the capability and achievement are in a kind of feedback loop with each other, I think it's clear that as a species we only just barely cross that threshold.

So, it seems to me that in the domain of technologically capable intelligences, we are just barely on the lower bound of the scale. After all, how much have we really evolved, as a species, since the development of behavioral modernity ~30k years ago? A sobering thought. Furthermore our progress as a species is driven by those at the forefront of thought and invention, people like Pythagoras, Galileo, Newton and Einstein. They're the ones pushing forwards the bounds of our achievement. The rest of us are along for the ride. So really only the smartest of us have crossed the threshold of intelligence necessary to achieve a technological society, and most of us are riding on their coat tails.