Good to see you back Caleb!
by Venator of VerumAnts engage in a form of agriculture.
Some grow fungus in their cave networks and some are involved in aphid husbandry.
And termites of the kalahari build skyscrapers. Yeah, its true that compared to us they're not, but compared to their own size, yes, they're sky scrapers.
And beavers build some quite effective dams along streams.
Crows consistently turn twigs into tools.
And some chimpanzees use rocks as hammers, and often craft them into sharper hammers.
And dolphins use complex language.
The only thing we've really done, is employ all of these strategies at once, while neglecting some simple but useful old ones, and say we were superior for it. How does one measure superiority?
Actually the other hominid species died off long, long before we developed civilization. This clearly means we were successful. The reason why is anyone's guess, but it has something to do with us being more adapted to about any environment and set of conditions. Humans were even really successful before agriculture came around, as homo sapiens sapiens survived on a global scale. We didn't even really get into changing our environments to survive, we were just very adapted. Maybe our brains were better at developing strategies for hunting and gathering compared to other hominid species. I got a little excessive with my insult, but i do that to everyone just because :). We had a powerful, fearsome presence before the agricultural revolution even, m8.
Don't get me wrong, we've employed winning strategies together as a fierce combination. But let's be honest, most people have the intelligence of chimpanzees, enough are intelligent enough to build up their image. People suck. They really do.
At the end of the day, before the few innovators (few by comparison to the majority), we were just apes with spears. Just look at the san people. They're excellent hunters but they live the way humans did originally, but they aren't building skyscrapers. We needed writing for that. We're good at finding ways around our limitations, that's something we take and come closest to superior with. Beyond that, we're just another animal, and it'd be foolish to think othera wise.
As a sidenote, our winning strategy might be the very thing that destroys us, and takes the world with it as we either leave it barren or sterile. Either by MAD, stripping it bare of resources, or polluting it until it is just too toxic to be habitable. If winning means we're superior, then we sure as hell show our superiority, by the way we handle our godlike power. Then again, maybe that's what happens when you give apes what we were given. It got us out of the ice age, that was what our brains evolved for, a climate that was hostile to us, we found a way to be immune to climatic change extremes. I'd say to our own detriment in large part.