If one considers evolution as a winnowing process for producing more and more faithful representations of the world about the living organism then all present life is smarter than previous life. It's there in the competition for resources requirement for fitness. A human brain is much smarter than an ape brain because the human brain is required to do more thinking, thinking about past and present, thinking about weapons, thinking about language, about all those myriad other capacities considered as being smart.
It's not the output devices, those capacities that produce experience that are smart. Rather it is is in those devices that permit one to get on a target, to distinguish threat from non thread, that permit translation of image data to language data, that are smart. These are the exquisite capacities that permit one to experience which is, after all, just a movie being played based on the work these, as you call them, dumb brain activities. Outputs are consequences of sensing, perceiving, thinking, memory formation, production, and recall, and just the sounds, feelings, movements, generated by that highly evolved smart brain in that wonderfully adept human being.
Consciousness is an evolved social capacity primarily evolved to sustain fitness within species. It's not the executive. It is product running the results of the true executive integrated thinking processes.
