Apparently, Gobekli Tepe was built ~6000 years before Sumer arose. Sumer is the civilization that is claimed to have developed writing, the wheel, and other blessings of civilization. Gobekli Tepe is claimed to have been built by hunter/gatherers. However, Dr. Martin Sweatman has proved that those hunter/gatherers that didn't have the wheel, or writing, knew of the 26,000 year long precession of the equinoxes. I submit that without written records, and mathematics, it's impossible to have that understanding of astronomy.

I do believe humans 40kya were smarter than us, because the skulls we have found from that time held larger brains than ours do. Whether that makes them superior to us or not is dependent on how you define superior. I think that all else being equal, being smarter is better.

But, I have proved many times that smart people can do really dumb things. Superiority depends on a lot more than raw intelligence. What you do with what intelligence you have is far more important than what you have to do it with.