So humans have made many innovations and new technology over the past thousand years but animals never do?
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Humans differ from (most) animals in two important ways: tool use and language. Other animals have limited versions of each of these, but there’s very limited evidence of animals fashioning tools (rather than just using natural objects) and none for communicating abstract ideas.
These two traits together are great for technology and innovation. When you are a young caveperson, your parents use *language* to explain how to use *tools* like flint or kindling to build a fire. From this, humans can abstract (something animals also struggle with) to understand the basic things that are needed for a fire: heat and dry fuel. You keep track of those needs in your daily life to see if there are other ways to meet them. This could lead to experimenting with different sources of fuel or heat (e.g. friction or the sun) to spark a fire. What you learn gets passed down to your children, and so on until anyone can buy a lighter for a few bucks.
In animals, there is less tool use, so that means fewer avenues for experimentation. There is also no language that can handle abstract concepts, so even if a given animal learns something interesting, that knowledge dies with them.
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