Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my opinion.

By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which is problematic.

However arguably humans existed from tens of thousands of years and only really started to make huge technological leaps when writing existed. Prewriting culture is still quite fascinating and complex (ex: Homer or Olmec/Maya art) but it does seem to be stuck at a certain level.

I think Egyptian civilization provides a fascinating mid point where there is writing but it's not very accessible... And Egyptian civilization is slow to develop (it's also very weird they don't have their equivalent of Homer or Gilgamesh)