it isn't clear intelligence was ever more important than say brute strength/social skills/etc. in our evolutionary history
The juxtaposition of intelligence vs. social skills is amusing given the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis, which suggests that our general intelligence basically evolved precisely as a means to get ahead in the social games that are relevant for sexual selection.
If you can reason abstractly about what some rival is going to do and examine the "game tree" of potential actions, that is surely an advantage both for sexual selection and, say, debugging or proving theorems.
The juxtaposition of intelligence vs. social skills is amusing given the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis, which suggests that our general intelligence basically evolved precisely as a means to get ahead in the social games that are relevant for sexual selection.
If you can reason abstractly about what some rival is going to do and examine the "game tree" of potential actions, that is surely an advantage both for sexual selection and, say, debugging or proving theorems.