[eli5] Why did humans advance so far so fast while other intelligent animals did not?
In: 944
If you only look at the past few thousand years then sure, we developed extremely fast, but you’re then ignoring the millions of years before that. We’ve had fire for a million of years, stone tools for 2.6 million of year, and civilisation only came about maybe 10,000 years ago.
The fact that we developed civilisation when we did is due to a factor of our intelligence, luck in our biology (elephant and dolphins are extremely smart, but don’t have the bodies for tools and fire) and a whole lot of time.
An intelligent species may not always lead to civilisation if other factors don’t align for them
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