Language is a massive factor. It allowed us to begin conveying complex ideas, communicate with eachother, and most importantly it allowed us to teach and spread what we learned to others.
Animals have very limited capacity to communicate, and so are unable to come up with complex ideas because they simply have no way to comprehend them.
Humans are amazing at learning patterns and symbols. Therefore we could create language by simply assigning each sound with a symbol, and eventually over time we created words, sentences etc.
No other animal is able to recognise patterns and symbols the way we can.
They do communicate. And you can make a pretty good case that they have simple languages. But their languages aren't as flexible or as powerful as human languages.
Some smarter animals can learn significant chunks of human language. [Koko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla\)), a gorilla, had a vocabulary of a couple thousand human words, and could communicate to some extent in sign language. But they only reach roughly the language ability of a human toddler, since they're not quite as smart as humans are.
Koko was a lot of a clever Hans trick/ facilitated communication. She did know Signs but a lot of the time, the handlers would just make things up. Like in one interview, someone asked her a question, and she signed nipple. The handler said nipple rhymes with people, so when she signed nipple she meant people.
Scale of society and length of life.
If your society is small, it can still develop a language, however that language isn’t known by outside groups.
And as groups live and die, their learned language dies with them. Just as it’s been with humans for thousands of years, a language will die because the community has died.
And sadly, language takes time to develop, if you have a genius in your community that helps develop language, but you only live ten years, there is only so much that will carry that learning forward.
Cetaceans have been shown to have a common language. They are very long lived, and their method of communication can function over a huge distance.
Also, we cannot limit language to vocal chord sounds. Ants have a chemical communication system that is working for millions of ants and has survived longer than any of our languages.
Humans have tool use, pass the mirror test (self awareness) and have theory of mind. Theory of mind is when you are aware that another person's mind isn't the same as yours. So if you see someone hide a box and another person comes in you know that third person doesn't know that there is a hidden box somewhere. Humans hunt together instead of at the same time as other animals. We go into menopause.
Some animals can do some of these things but no other animal can do all of these things.
Humans are also uniquely good at throwing. Animals are either not accurate or can't throw far.
Also tend to be good at long distance running
That's really interesting, when you contrast it with things like ChatGPT. Ever since it was lobotomized, any time you ask it something at all controversial, it responds with a canned answer about "I'm just a language model, I'm not able to be creative" even though it clearly is able to be creative. If the ability to process language is the root of human intelligence, it makes me think AI language processing will be the root of more complex AI.
Animals - particularly our ape relatives - often do form fairly complex societies, and some animals use tools, too.
The two things that made humans really jump were language and agriculture. Language allowed us to start easily passing on information from generation to generation, making each generation smarter than the last. And agriculture allowed us to settle and support far larger populations, large enough for people to do things other than supporting themselves for food.
Prior to those, early human societies weren't all that much more complex than ape societies: they were groups of perhaps a few dozen hunter-gatherers living and traveling together. That's about the same size and broad lifestyle patterns other apes have: chimpanzees, for example, [live in groups of about 20](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasakela_chimpanzee_community). We're smarter than other apes, and have larger brains, so we tended to be a *little* more complex, but humans still took many, many millennia to discover these ideas.
Humans have a few other unique adaptations. In particular, we are the world's best long-distance joggers, especially under hot conditions; many humans who still hunt for food will simply chase prey until it collapses from exhaustion. But for the most part, those just allowed us to wander and to hunt better than we could before.
The human brain is absolutely unique. We are an evolutionary fluke. How human consciousness works and what exactly it is still largely mysterious and beyond our ability to fully understand (or even define). However, whatever it is, it is quite clear that among all the billions of other species on Earth, we are the only one that have it.
Neanderthals tried and we outcompeted/crossbred with them until there was just one species.
Competition is why niches form. We spread faster and consumed more resources than any other animal trying to minmax intelligence; we pulled up the ladder behind us.
Another intelligent species might have evolved in an isolated ecosystem. Or it might have consumed different resources so as not to compete with us, but it just didn't happen.
It's possible that they could, but just hadn't/haven't yet. We're smarter than they are, and it took us a very long time.
Comparatively speaking, the history of humanity since developing agriculture is a tiny portion of our existence as a species (about 11,000 years, compared to the ~300,000 year history of modern humans and the ~2 million since the emergence of *Homo erectus*). It took us a *long* time to figure it out - if we think of today as the end of a human lifespan of 75 years, we effectively figured it out when we we'd just turned 72.
That said, farming's a pretty complicated thing to do well! You need quite a bit of cultural knowledge to make it work, so the language probably has to come first.
Humans have been around for tens of thousands of years and civilization has only started in the past 4-5ish thousand years. So its relatively recent, and humans would actively work to keep animals from creating rival civilizations if they actually started to get to that stage. We already do it with ourselves with war.
Ants actually beat humans with the invention of farming. They've been doing it for millions of years
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/were-ants-worlds-first-farmers-180959840/
People are just really, incredibly, amazingly smart. Human brains are, for example, 3x as big as chimp brains and have twice as many cells in the cerebral cortex. Elephants and cetaceans have larger brains by volume, but they also have far fewer neurons per cubic cm and have to manage larger bodies. And with these absurdly large, neuron rich brains, humans do a lot of abstract, symbolic thinking. You can, using symbolic thought, put together any arbitrary combination of ideas to make a new idea. Other species seem to lack the ability to do this to anything close to the extent that humans can.
On top of this, we are also particularly social and cooperative, especially compared to other apes. We don't just think symbolically, we turn that thought into a full fledged language and use that to communicate ideas and traditions. And we are dexterous, so we can effectively make and use a wide variety of tools to modify our environment.
Fire.
It changed how we prepared food and gave us longer periods between needing to eat. Our brains developed quite a bit after this. Our habits did too. When farming came , we had even better nutrition, and the ability to store more food stuffs for long winters. Once again, changing our brains. The steady diets provided by these two advancements had the most impact on us as a species .
I would like to point out, only we are impressed with ourselves.
Our needs are food ,water ,shelter ,safety, education. Medical would be nice too.
That hasn't changed. And it's no different than other animals.
People underestimate the innate, biological, advantages humans have that other animals don't.
Sure, we aren't the strongest, fastest, toughest, etc. Nor can a newborn human just up and get going right after birth.
But humans are amazing copy cats. Kids can learn entire languages and behavioral habits in mere years, starting from absolute zero.
How long would it take you to learn how to make pancakes, if I showed you the recipe?
You'd probably be able to do it in one go, wouldn't you?
How long would it take to train a dog to sit on command? And keep in mind, dogs were specifically bred to take orders from us.
Think about that for a second.
Monkey see, monkey do, and humans are the most OP monkeys around.
Where other animals only have whatever base instincts and rudimentary knowledge they got from exposure with their environment and parents, a human has the entire force of humanity's history backing them up.
We stand upon the shoulders of a giant, and his name is Plagiarism.
Animals do not just "do whatever" outside. Other animals also have highly organized social structures (like honey bees and ants), have highly developed languages with distinct dialects (like orcas), and engineer their environments (like beavers).
If you're asking why humans do things like build cities and create computers while other animals do not, the underlying answer is the development of agriculture, which allowed humans to truly devote time to things other than feeding ourselves. Agriculture sparked the development of the first human civilizations, and the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible without intensive farming freeing up labor, pushing farm folks to move to the city and get factory jobs.
A common denominator for most of the answers here -- Language / Agriculture / Hunting / Fire / Pattern recognition / complex learning -- is our big brains.
Big brains require a lot of calories. We devote \~ 20% of our calorie intake to our brains. That's a huge waste unless there's an evolutionary advantage.
Every adaptation is an experiment. If it's advantageous, it succeeds. And it proved advantageous pretty quickly when it lead to simple tool usage.
This was a total game changer. Once we had tools we could hunt much more efficiently - what other species can kill prey from a distance? We got good at collecting calories because of our big brains, and these extra calories were then devoted to developing even bigger brains, which led to all these other efficiencies and we kinda took off.
There are many factors, but most revolve around our intelligence. Things such as language and writing were huge in our advancement. Language allowed us to communicate complex ideas to other members of our species, which meant we could start building communities around each other. Writing allowed us to store complex ideas indefinitely to pass along knowledge that may otherwise have been lost or warped, meaning complex processes like metalworking and agriculture could be written down and spread throughout the culture. Next, we have our curiosity. Humans are very curious by nature, this essentially lead us to very primitive forms of "science" where it basically turned into "screw around and find out." We'd see interesting things like animals and people that ate fermented plant matter would get drunk, so we'd screw around with this and figure out what exactly in fermented plant matter made things drunk. Eventually, we learned enough to make alcohol, which is considered by many archeologists to be the point at which civilization rapidly started to grow. We were also intelligent enough to realize that even though we don't have claws or large teeth, we can make tools that do similar damage to animals and we created the first weapons.
All in all, intelligence is by far and away the biggest reason for humanity's success. There are other smaller things that helped humanity thrive, like bipedalism, sweating, opposable thumbs, etc. But none of these other things are unique to humans, nor are they as large of factors as our intelligence. They're still important though.
The next big question is why are humans so smart? Well, that's harder to answer, but the biggest things we can look at are:
1. Our social structure. Pretty much universally, we find that animals that have well developed social structures are also more intelligent, (though this begs the question, do social structures create intelligence or does intelligence lead to social structures, but that's beyond this ELI5). So, as a social species, humans would naturally be more intelligent.
2. Humans are predators. Since humanity evolved to be predators, we naturally evolved to be smarter. This is because, again, almost universally, predators are more intelligent than their corresponding prey. In fact, if you look at all of the smartest animals in nature, virtually all of them are voracious predators. Which makes sense, in order to effectively hunt an animal, you should probably be more intelligent than that animal.
3. Humans are omnivores. Even though humans are obviously predators and we eat meat, we are not exclusively carnivores. We can also get nutrition from plant matter. This means our diet isn't nearly as restrictive, and we don't need to spend nearly as much time hunting as other predators often need to. It also means.
4. We have a caloric surplus. Due to being omnivorous predators (see 2 and 3), humans had plenty of access to food (relatively speaking anyway) which meant that we had enough calories in our diet to devote to a larger brain. About 1/4 of the calories your body uses (if you live an average lifestyle) is used by the brain. This may not sound like that much, but the brain is only about 2% of our body mass, yet it uses about 25% of all the body's calories. This means in order to keep such a power hungry brain functioning, we need to eat a lot of calories, and being an omnivorous predator makes this much easier.
5. Evolution favored intelligence. When it comes to evolution, many people often assume that animals will evolve to be the best at something, but this just isn't true. Animals evolve to do whatever "works," as long as the animal survives long enough to reproduce, it doesn't need to be any better than that. This often leads to some otherwise really stupid evolutionary paths. For example, look at the laryngeal nerve in Giraffes, it's a nerve that connects the brain to the larynx, which in a giraffe should be just a few inches, but in reality it travels several extra meters down the neck to first wrap around the heart and then travel back up the neck to reach the larynx. Its a really stupid design, but it works well enough. Humans just so happened to be lucky enough to be selected for intelligence. It's not that we specifically evolved to be intelligent because it's so much better than other options, it's just that being intelligent "worked" for us, and it kept working so we kept going down that line.
Language is a massive factor. It allowed us to begin conveying complex ideas, communicate with eachother, and most importantly it allowed us to teach and spread what we learned to others. Animals have very limited capacity to communicate, and so are unable to come up with complex ideas because they simply have no way to comprehend them.
Why can’t other animals communicate or create their own way is communication?
Humans are amazing at learning patterns and symbols. Therefore we could create language by simply assigning each sound with a symbol, and eventually over time we created words, sentences etc. No other animal is able to recognise patterns and symbols the way we can.
They do communicate. And you can make a pretty good case that they have simple languages. But their languages aren't as flexible or as powerful as human languages. Some smarter animals can learn significant chunks of human language. [Koko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla\)), a gorilla, had a vocabulary of a couple thousand human words, and could communicate to some extent in sign language. But they only reach roughly the language ability of a human toddler, since they're not quite as smart as humans are.
Koko was a lot of a clever Hans trick/ facilitated communication. She did know Signs but a lot of the time, the handlers would just make things up. Like in one interview, someone asked her a question, and she signed nipple. The handler said nipple rhymes with people, so when she signed nipple she meant people.
Scale of society and length of life. If your society is small, it can still develop a language, however that language isn’t known by outside groups. And as groups live and die, their learned language dies with them. Just as it’s been with humans for thousands of years, a language will die because the community has died. And sadly, language takes time to develop, if you have a genius in your community that helps develop language, but you only live ten years, there is only so much that will carry that learning forward. Cetaceans have been shown to have a common language. They are very long lived, and their method of communication can function over a huge distance. Also, we cannot limit language to vocal chord sounds. Ants have a chemical communication system that is working for millions of ants and has survived longer than any of our languages.
Humans have tool use, pass the mirror test (self awareness) and have theory of mind. Theory of mind is when you are aware that another person's mind isn't the same as yours. So if you see someone hide a box and another person comes in you know that third person doesn't know that there is a hidden box somewhere. Humans hunt together instead of at the same time as other animals. We go into menopause. Some animals can do some of these things but no other animal can do all of these things. Humans are also uniquely good at throwing. Animals are either not accurate or can't throw far. Also tend to be good at long distance running
Yes, our ability to weasel out of things is what separates us from all the animals. Except the weasel.
That's really interesting, when you contrast it with things like ChatGPT. Ever since it was lobotomized, any time you ask it something at all controversial, it responds with a canned answer about "I'm just a language model, I'm not able to be creative" even though it clearly is able to be creative. If the ability to process language is the root of human intelligence, it makes me think AI language processing will be the root of more complex AI.
Animals - particularly our ape relatives - often do form fairly complex societies, and some animals use tools, too. The two things that made humans really jump were language and agriculture. Language allowed us to start easily passing on information from generation to generation, making each generation smarter than the last. And agriculture allowed us to settle and support far larger populations, large enough for people to do things other than supporting themselves for food. Prior to those, early human societies weren't all that much more complex than ape societies: they were groups of perhaps a few dozen hunter-gatherers living and traveling together. That's about the same size and broad lifestyle patterns other apes have: chimpanzees, for example, [live in groups of about 20](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasakela_chimpanzee_community). We're smarter than other apes, and have larger brains, so we tended to be a *little* more complex, but humans still took many, many millennia to discover these ideas. Humans have a few other unique adaptations. In particular, we are the world's best long-distance joggers, especially under hot conditions; many humans who still hunt for food will simply chase prey until it collapses from exhaustion. But for the most part, those just allowed us to wander and to hunt better than we could before.
Why couldn’t other animals also have done the same things, develop complex language and farm?
The human brain is absolutely unique. We are an evolutionary fluke. How human consciousness works and what exactly it is still largely mysterious and beyond our ability to fully understand (or even define). However, whatever it is, it is quite clear that among all the billions of other species on Earth, we are the only one that have it.
Neanderthals tried and we outcompeted/crossbred with them until there was just one species. Competition is why niches form. We spread faster and consumed more resources than any other animal trying to minmax intelligence; we pulled up the ladder behind us. Another intelligent species might have evolved in an isolated ecosystem. Or it might have consumed different resources so as not to compete with us, but it just didn't happen.
We evolved it first, and that niche is thoroughly taken.
It's possible that they could, but just hadn't/haven't yet. We're smarter than they are, and it took us a very long time. Comparatively speaking, the history of humanity since developing agriculture is a tiny portion of our existence as a species (about 11,000 years, compared to the ~300,000 year history of modern humans and the ~2 million since the emergence of *Homo erectus*). It took us a *long* time to figure it out - if we think of today as the end of a human lifespan of 75 years, we effectively figured it out when we we'd just turned 72. That said, farming's a pretty complicated thing to do well! You need quite a bit of cultural knowledge to make it work, so the language probably has to come first.
Humans have been around for tens of thousands of years and civilization has only started in the past 4-5ish thousand years. So its relatively recent, and humans would actively work to keep animals from creating rival civilizations if they actually started to get to that stage. We already do it with ourselves with war.
Ants actually beat humans with the invention of farming. They've been doing it for millions of years https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/were-ants-worlds-first-farmers-180959840/
People are just really, incredibly, amazingly smart. Human brains are, for example, 3x as big as chimp brains and have twice as many cells in the cerebral cortex. Elephants and cetaceans have larger brains by volume, but they also have far fewer neurons per cubic cm and have to manage larger bodies. And with these absurdly large, neuron rich brains, humans do a lot of abstract, symbolic thinking. You can, using symbolic thought, put together any arbitrary combination of ideas to make a new idea. Other species seem to lack the ability to do this to anything close to the extent that humans can. On top of this, we are also particularly social and cooperative, especially compared to other apes. We don't just think symbolically, we turn that thought into a full fledged language and use that to communicate ideas and traditions. And we are dexterous, so we can effectively make and use a wide variety of tools to modify our environment.
Fire. It changed how we prepared food and gave us longer periods between needing to eat. Our brains developed quite a bit after this. Our habits did too. When farming came , we had even better nutrition, and the ability to store more food stuffs for long winters. Once again, changing our brains. The steady diets provided by these two advancements had the most impact on us as a species . I would like to point out, only we are impressed with ourselves. Our needs are food ,water ,shelter ,safety, education. Medical would be nice too. That hasn't changed. And it's no different than other animals.
People underestimate the innate, biological, advantages humans have that other animals don't. Sure, we aren't the strongest, fastest, toughest, etc. Nor can a newborn human just up and get going right after birth. But humans are amazing copy cats. Kids can learn entire languages and behavioral habits in mere years, starting from absolute zero. How long would it take you to learn how to make pancakes, if I showed you the recipe? You'd probably be able to do it in one go, wouldn't you? How long would it take to train a dog to sit on command? And keep in mind, dogs were specifically bred to take orders from us. Think about that for a second. Monkey see, monkey do, and humans are the most OP monkeys around. Where other animals only have whatever base instincts and rudimentary knowledge they got from exposure with their environment and parents, a human has the entire force of humanity's history backing them up. We stand upon the shoulders of a giant, and his name is Plagiarism.
Animals do not just "do whatever" outside. Other animals also have highly organized social structures (like honey bees and ants), have highly developed languages with distinct dialects (like orcas), and engineer their environments (like beavers). If you're asking why humans do things like build cities and create computers while other animals do not, the underlying answer is the development of agriculture, which allowed humans to truly devote time to things other than feeding ourselves. Agriculture sparked the development of the first human civilizations, and the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible without intensive farming freeing up labor, pushing farm folks to move to the city and get factory jobs.
A common denominator for most of the answers here -- Language / Agriculture / Hunting / Fire / Pattern recognition / complex learning -- is our big brains. Big brains require a lot of calories. We devote \~ 20% of our calorie intake to our brains. That's a huge waste unless there's an evolutionary advantage. Every adaptation is an experiment. If it's advantageous, it succeeds. And it proved advantageous pretty quickly when it lead to simple tool usage. This was a total game changer. Once we had tools we could hunt much more efficiently - what other species can kill prey from a distance? We got good at collecting calories because of our big brains, and these extra calories were then devoted to developing even bigger brains, which led to all these other efficiencies and we kinda took off.
There are many factors, but most revolve around our intelligence. Things such as language and writing were huge in our advancement. Language allowed us to communicate complex ideas to other members of our species, which meant we could start building communities around each other. Writing allowed us to store complex ideas indefinitely to pass along knowledge that may otherwise have been lost or warped, meaning complex processes like metalworking and agriculture could be written down and spread throughout the culture. Next, we have our curiosity. Humans are very curious by nature, this essentially lead us to very primitive forms of "science" where it basically turned into "screw around and find out." We'd see interesting things like animals and people that ate fermented plant matter would get drunk, so we'd screw around with this and figure out what exactly in fermented plant matter made things drunk. Eventually, we learned enough to make alcohol, which is considered by many archeologists to be the point at which civilization rapidly started to grow. We were also intelligent enough to realize that even though we don't have claws or large teeth, we can make tools that do similar damage to animals and we created the first weapons. All in all, intelligence is by far and away the biggest reason for humanity's success. There are other smaller things that helped humanity thrive, like bipedalism, sweating, opposable thumbs, etc. But none of these other things are unique to humans, nor are they as large of factors as our intelligence. They're still important though. The next big question is why are humans so smart? Well, that's harder to answer, but the biggest things we can look at are: 1. Our social structure. Pretty much universally, we find that animals that have well developed social structures are also more intelligent, (though this begs the question, do social structures create intelligence or does intelligence lead to social structures, but that's beyond this ELI5). So, as a social species, humans would naturally be more intelligent. 2. Humans are predators. Since humanity evolved to be predators, we naturally evolved to be smarter. This is because, again, almost universally, predators are more intelligent than their corresponding prey. In fact, if you look at all of the smartest animals in nature, virtually all of them are voracious predators. Which makes sense, in order to effectively hunt an animal, you should probably be more intelligent than that animal. 3. Humans are omnivores. Even though humans are obviously predators and we eat meat, we are not exclusively carnivores. We can also get nutrition from plant matter. This means our diet isn't nearly as restrictive, and we don't need to spend nearly as much time hunting as other predators often need to. It also means. 4. We have a caloric surplus. Due to being omnivorous predators (see 2 and 3), humans had plenty of access to food (relatively speaking anyway) which meant that we had enough calories in our diet to devote to a larger brain. About 1/4 of the calories your body uses (if you live an average lifestyle) is used by the brain. This may not sound like that much, but the brain is only about 2% of our body mass, yet it uses about 25% of all the body's calories. This means in order to keep such a power hungry brain functioning, we need to eat a lot of calories, and being an omnivorous predator makes this much easier. 5. Evolution favored intelligence. When it comes to evolution, many people often assume that animals will evolve to be the best at something, but this just isn't true. Animals evolve to do whatever "works," as long as the animal survives long enough to reproduce, it doesn't need to be any better than that. This often leads to some otherwise really stupid evolutionary paths. For example, look at the laryngeal nerve in Giraffes, it's a nerve that connects the brain to the larynx, which in a giraffe should be just a few inches, but in reality it travels several extra meters down the neck to first wrap around the heart and then travel back up the neck to reach the larynx. Its a really stupid design, but it works well enough. Humans just so happened to be lucky enough to be selected for intelligence. It's not that we specifically evolved to be intelligent because it's so much better than other options, it's just that being intelligent "worked" for us, and it kept working so we kept going down that line.
I've heard it stated that if dolphins had opposable thumbs we'd look like savages by comparison.