Humans Aren't as Special as We Once Thought

August 19, 2025

5 min read

Other species exhibit capabilities that were once thought to be exclusive to Homo sapiens

By Kate Wong edited by Seth Fletcher

It was the telegram exchange that sparked an identity crisis for humankind. In 1960 a young Jane Goodall working in a remote forest in Tanzania observed a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard using blades of grass and twigs to fish nutritious termites out of their nest. The primatologist wrote to her mentor, Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, to tell him about her observation, which flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that held that only humans made tools. Leakey replied: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

For decades—centuries, even—scholars have attempted to draw a hard line between our kind and the other organisms with whom we share the planet. They have argued that only humans have culture—sets of learned behaviors, such as toolmaking, that are passed down from generation to generation. They have proposed that only humans think symbolically, using signs to represent objects or ideas. That our species alone is self-aware, capable of planning for the future and experiencing emotions such as joy and fear, love and grief. That only humans are conscious, possessed of an inner world of subjective experience.

For his part, Charles Darwin, writing in the late 1800s, opined that nonhuman animals have the same cognitive abilities and emotions that humans have and that any differences were a matter of degree and not kind. In the absence of any way to reliably read animal minds, however, scientists who studied animal behavior and cognition took the position that ascribing human thoughts, feelings and motivations to animals—anthropomorphism—was a cardinal sin. But in recent decades examples of other species demonstrating these capabilities have emerged from across the tree of life. The findings have spurred fresh thinking about what, exactly, distinguishes Homo sapiens, with our vaunted intellect, from every other species on Earth.

Let’s look first at our evolutionary nearest and dearest. We H. sapiens possess much larger brains than our closest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos, do—around three times as large. The brain requires 20 percent of our energy budget despite making up only 2 percent of our body mass. Naturally, anthropologists have wondered why we evolved such energetically expensive brains. At the same time, we know that H. sapiens is the sole surviving member of what was once a diverse group of humanoids. Surely our big brains and all the clever things they allow us to do were a major reason for our success as a species, a vital factor in why we alone went on to spread across the globe and thrive in every ecosystem we set our sights on, outcompeting other branches of humanity until we were the last hominin standing.

More:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-uniqueness-is-a-myth-mounting-evidence-shows/