I've written a long, grandiose thread on Northwest European mental distinctiveness you might find interesting: @akarlin88 @Steve_Sailer @bronzeagemantis @espressosoldo @gcochran99

This is the Big One: the “why are Northwest Europeans so...different from everyone else?” post. I’m going to argue that they really do possess a significant mental advantage over other people, a result of frontal lobe overgrowth enabled by lactose tolerance.

Back in 2000 or so, there were lots of Nordicist attempts to explain NW European advantages by invoking ancient hunter gatherers. These arguments run into the problem that it's NE Europeans, like Latvians, who possess the highest amount of this ancestry, not Isaac Newton.

Since 2010 some people have made the assumption that maybe NW Europeans have the highest amount of Indo-European steppe blood; again they don't and again Latvians are #1. Here's a nice spreadsheet from the great Davidski illustrating the point: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g-cEJmS9cZ6r-_9p0qj1f2qszxiJbactk89DOd0TlHg/edit#gid=1320636554

If NW Europeans really do possess distinct mental advantages they would have to be of very recent origin, within the last 5,000 years or so.

There are three traits I know of where Northwest Europeans really do represent a worldwide extreme: lactose tolerance, frontal lobe size, and a low waist to hip ratio. I think all three are related and complement each other.

Northwest Europeans grow up thinking of lactose intolerance as a disease, but it’s the worldwide norm everywhere outside of Cowland. EIGHTY-ONE percent of Czechs are lactose intolerant. https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/cms/attachment/9111b7c5-75ea-4d6c-83e1-8094826e776a/gr3.gif