[eli5] Why did humans advance so far so fast while other intelligent animals did not?
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It’s important to remember that intelligence isn’t necessarily a good thing, evolutionarily speaking.
The most intelligent animals needed to evolve to have sex for pleasure because once you are smart enough to know sex->babies you may decide to avoid sex enough you really enjoy it.
There are certain tasks that chimps are better at than humans, like quickly identifying numbers. Humans may be smarter but that is not an advantage if life’s tasks don’t need it. Less intelligence and more instinct may mean better hunting or fast identification of threats.
Humans must have had intelligence at the right time to take advantage of it. We were walking upright and using language at the right time to use tools and teach our offspring to use them too.
Octopuses use tools but don’t seem to have language to pass on knowledge and develop sophisticated tools.
Ravens use tools an have some language but don’t have the dexterity to develop more complex tools.
Perhaps in time another species will do it but it hasn’t happened and we haven’t seen evidence of it happening before. We haven’t seen any fossils of raptor tools or giant sloth villages.
With a sample size of one we can’t be sure what is needed to develop our level of technology so we can only speculate on the reasons.
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