Bear in mind that the Curiosity rover, it's parts and all the pre-requisite science was not thought up by a single person. The design probably used many pre-existing parts that had been used in previous space-missions - several of which were not designed by the Curiosity designer (or design-team). These parts have been developed and refined over the years. As for the science behind the parts and the missions, that was defined over the course of the centuries by countless intellectuals.

So basically, what it boils down to is that an intelligent person today has a lot more pre-existing knowledge to play with than an intelligent person from 1000BCE.

Let's just hope that Disney does not bring him back, make him talk only in Jive and turn his leitmotif into some early 20th century Jazz.

Just in case Disney needs any inspiration on how to make Starwars worse, there was a discussion-thread on alternatehistory.com about how Star wars Episode 1 could have been made worse - http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=236784. Some of the suggestions are truly inspired. One of them being introducing some subtle racism and making Jar-Jar Binks a stereotypical black person who only talks in Jive. Also by not hiring John Williams to do the score, we'd end up with Jar-Jar's leitmotif being some early 20th century Jazz.

...can be summed up in this video-clip by Fascinating Aïda.

There's a theory that ancient literature from about 3000 years ago points to humans having a different way of perceiving the world than they do today (Bicameral Mind). This is described in the following Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29 ).

>"For example, in the Iliad and sections of the Old Testament no mention is made of any kind of cognitive processes such as introspection, and there is no apparent indication that the writers were self-aware."

While 2684 years isn't quite as old as 3000 years, there might be a chance that part of this 'previous state of conciousness' may be preserved.