[eli5] Why did humans advance so far so fast while other intelligent animals did not?
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Our social intelligence was the most important factor *by far*. Groups of humans meant that many more babies could actually survive delivery and adolescence which is exceedingly rare in nature, because youngsters are the most vulnerable. It allowed us to coordinate with each other and combine our ideas. If one of your friends notices that fire makes food taste good, you don’t need to fight with him like wild animals would. Instead, you two take your ideas to others and say “Hey, spread the word that fire is good!”, and before long you would have a flourishing community of healthy people as opposed to competition with another group *over* fire. This allowed our intelligence to increase tenfold. No other animal on Earth even comes close to matching us in intelligence, the best averaging no more than the intelligence of human babies.
As for why this developed, we’re not really sure. Few species of animals exhibit social cooperation. Our guesses indicate that the African environment was harsh enough that those that didn’t band together died, while those that did survived and promoted social interaction.
There’s another famous animal that is well known for its social skills. Can you guess what it was? Wolves. And we made them our pets. The hardy auroch is another example, but they didn’t take our “food tame” approach as well and would instead attack us on sight. So, we hunted them into extinction.
There are also some other physical traits, like sweating. Humans are the most heat efficient animals on the planet, because we use water to cool off. Nearly every other species has to rest or sit in shade. So it’s no surprise that humans are the best endurance runners on the planet. You don’t need to be as fast as a cheetah, but if you can run 10x further than it on the same day, you’ve got pretty good odds.
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