We Are Qualitatively Different from Other Species

There's usually at least one other example in the animal world. Just that we may do these things in combination and so much better that the difference becomes qualitative.

I'd say the only uniquely human thing is creating fire. https://twitter.com/mluby/status/1256768920343756801 Yes, there's that Australian bird that moves fire around, so I had to narrow it to creating rather than just using fire.

(The article is lame, so focusing just on the title…)

But how different are humans? If you take a homo sapien in isolation and a chimpanzee in isolation (I know there's no such thing but for the sake of argument), how much difference is there really? Biologically it's not much. Even neurologically, we've basically got the same hardware with a bit more bandwidth for sensory processing, and a bit more processing power for higher order functions like planning and analysis.

The archeological record would seem to indicate that it took many tens of thousands of years for these minor fundamental differences to develop into something obviously qualitative. Whether you call these fundamental differences qualitative or quantitive to start with seems like a pretty subtle difference of perspective.

1. Belief/religion: there's an experiment I heard about where researchers put a banana in a tree but monkeys got shocked if they went for it. So the monkeys stopped trying to get that banana. And then the researchers gradually replaced each monkey with one who'd never been shocked. The new monkeys also never went for the tree banana, having picked up on the superstition from their group.

2. Organizations are just like packs or pods, not all of which are genetically based in nature.

3. Money is an interesting one. I'm not aware of animals even bartering or trading objects with each other, but I also wouldn't be surprised to hear it happens. It sounds like there are cases in the wild of animals trading sex for objects though. The oldest profession just got a lot older.