the funy thing is that they were relly inteligent few hundred years ago ...
It's true that Copernicus got his idea of the sun as the center from Najm al-Dīn al-Qazwīnī al-Kātibī, an Islamic scholar. It's not that some are smarter than others, just that some are more willing to accept the provable truth over their preconceived notions.