I thought everyone knew that the answer to the OP had to do with a big black monolith. 
It would have been awful if a moskito had hit that Monolith before the monkey man did !
i don’t think the impact of the ability to write and communicate with complex language can be overestimated.
certainly, these traits can be perceived as part of the intelligence gap, but the gap looks much wider as a result of these.
consider chips, for example. there are stupid humans. humans so unintelligent, you can find chimps that are smarter. the example of a chimp using a blade of grass as a tool to collect termites was given. that seems to me like a very intelligent thing to do, especially considering the idea is probably gotten indpendently quite often. imagine if chimps had a written language though, and the ability to communicate in complex language. they would be able to tell each other the problem, and build on novel ways to approach it. if chimps could build on past knowledge like humans can, they would certainly have invented the shovel by now. probably the inclined plane and some simple mathematics, too.
also, as was mentioned earlier, humans are not the only ones who evolved to be so intelligent. they just happened to be the lucky ones that worked out. and i think any time one asks “why us?”, one is using an unfair standard of measurement.
lastly, i read a good book on the topic in high school: “The Immense Journey” by loren eisley. i don’t remember terribly much about it, how factual it is, or how up to date it is, but i liked it when i read it, and it certainly made me think about some things.
hhmmm thread hijack… Any older threads discussing the book “The Naked Ape” by Desmond Morris ? I wanted to see what other people think of this “old” classic.
I have thought long and hard about this and the only answer I can come up with is breeding. I believe that from the moment we branched away from the other apes the females of our species escpecially, have been selectively breeding for traits that they considered ‘desirable’. So that, not only were we affected by ‘natural selection’, but also by the same sort of selection that turned wolves into chihuahuas. It is the only rational explanation for the extremeness in the changes of our species in such relatively short periods.
When you combine females selecting the ‘best’ males first, with the constant natural changes and great range of environments we develloped in, us switching from herbivore/omnivores to carnivore/omnivores, and our species propensity for killing of other humans we consider different from ourselves, you get an environment where only the smart, fast, and those with ingenuity survive to reproduce.
You may want to re-look at dolphins and whales. They appear to have a HIGHLY complex spoken language, play games with consistant rules, have unique names for each other, and can use certain frequencies of sound at certain depths in the ocean to communicate worldwide. Those in captivity are known for their speed in aquiring new skills. They are certainly intelligent, and if any non-human is going to be counted as sapient, it should be them.
While it’s certainly true that they have no technology or written language, it’s also true that they have no hands with which to develop either.
From The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
- Eric Cartman Voice * If dolphins are so smart, why do they keep getting caught in tuna nets? * /Eric Cartman Voice *
If people are so smart why do they still get involved in car accidents or get run over ? (Sounds similar)
Here is an article with detail about the violence of dolphins. Bummer–another rosy picture gone bad.
I still think they’re as smart as humans, but apparently not much nicer.
Chimps are also prone to violence and killing fellow chimps… so maybe intelligence is closely associated with violence ?