Eli5 why did humans take so long to create civilizations?

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I understand that it took quite a few million years for humans to accommodate to their environment, but why did apes for example stay the same approximately while we had all the advancement. For example why are we into philosophy, writing manifestos, infrastructure, complex design, technology etc while apes aren’t exactly.
Why did it take us 6 million years of hunting to think about farming?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It depends on what you mean by took “humans” so long. Homo sapiens are roughly 300,000 years old. There was a lot more evolution that needed to take place after we split from our chimp cousins until we became modern day humans. After Homo sapiens emerged, things moved relatively fast. Within a 100,000 years or so, we were out of Africa, and everything kept progressing from there.

As to why we progressed to civilization and apes didn’t is somewhat simple: we evolved into smarter animals while they didn’t. We were the brainy cousins, they were the brawny cousins.

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