No, not really. OTOH, there’s always been a large group of people – including anthropologists – who have argued for over a century that Neandertals were far less intelligent than Homo sapiens. Not by 3-4 IQ points, as we’d put things today, but by 30-40 IQ points. I.e., Neandertals were animals with semi-human shape but who lacked the religion, the inventiveness, the curiosity, the magnficent soul, the truly upright stature, the art and music, the Nazi party card, etc. of “real” humans.

They were like dark skinned Spanish folk without immigration papers, running around in Phoenix, leering at respectable wealthy Republicans. You get the idea?

So. Trying to make the case that H sapiens sapiens and H sapiens neandertalis were basically brothers under the skin is always going to be an uphill fight. If you would like to make that argument, it is not clever to agree at the onset of the discussion that “no, we don’t know exactly how CroMagnons and Neandertals would have scored on modern day IQ tests and possibly there was a noticable difference.”

Could he have meant present day modern humans rather than an ancestral modern human? The rest of his comment seems to be referring to modern humans using the present tense.

Why? Is there any good reason (non-political) for assuming that “we” today are exactly as intelligent (however you want to define it – g perhaps? or some other way?) on average as “we” were pre-holocene (or even a few thousand years ago)? Cochran and Harpending make a plausible argument in “The 10,000 Year Explosion” that humans may have changed mentally even over the course of recorded history. They could be wrong, but I see no reason why we should presume this as a matter of course. Are all human populations today even exactly the same in their distributions of “talents and temperaments” (to use Pinker’s phrase), or at least in the underlying genetic influences on these traits? It might be so, but mammalian species whose distribution covers a wide geographic and ecological range and are partially isolated from one another (either geographically or socially – e.g. Cochran, Harpending and Hardy paper) often exhibit significant genetically influenced phenotypic differences in the distributions of traits. From what I’ve read on the subject, we don’t yet seem to understand the genetic influences on intelligence well enough to say one way or the other whether different groups of Homo Sapiens (either from the past or contemporary) are/were or are/were not as smart as each other and it makes no sense to make an assumption either way, but to treat either hypothesis as plausible. I would, however, find it highly surprising if Neandertals were exactly the same mentally as modern humans whose ancestors have been living in large, settled, heirarchical, agricultural civilizations for thousands of years. Am I wrong on this?

what is this “they” and “us”? if these results are correct that would imply that you are asserting that some of *your* ancestors were as smart as pure humans

An interesting paper on Neandertal childbirth is:
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/20/8151.full

Given the difficulty of childbirth it must be true that a large brain was under strong positive selection in Neandertals, and I see no reason to think that they were not as smart as us.