The human mind is unlike any other. It’s the key that unlocked language, culture, abstract reasoning, long-term planning, and large-scale political coordination — all the cognitive features that set us so far apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. It need not diminish other creatures’ intelligence to describe ourselves, in the words of British psychologist Cecilia Heyes, as “animals that specialize in thinking and knowing.”
There’s endless debate over what separates human cognition from that of other animals and when it emerged. Ideally, to answer these questions, we’d be able to compare ourselves with the long line of primate and hominin ancestors that led directly to Homo sapiens. But unfortunately, brain tissue — not to mention behavior — doesn’t fossilize. The next best alternative is to see how we stack up against contemporary animals, most importantly, the great apes.
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