Your stumbling point is in your understanding of what 'intelligence' even is; psychologists have understood for years that there's no such thing as 'raw intelligence', there is only ever, and has only ever been, contextual, situational intelligence. We (that is, human society) cannot even agree on what 'IQ' is even supposed to be measuring, much less agree that it is a useful metric of anything very much.

Intelligence is a process, not a thing; it's the fire, and not the smoke. We won't get very far in understanding the nature of the fire of intelligence, if we just keep mucking around looking at the different bits of firewood, and trying to spot patterns in the smoke... We need to think deeper about it.