[CuriouslyC]

This isn't so correct. Humans in isolation aren't so vastly superior from other animals, if you observed primitive humans and your typical troop of chimps it wouldn't be the slam dunk you're singing about. The truth is we're just enough better to develop and use written communication, and the majority of human progress beyond that has been trial/error and imitation with successes preserved through writing. Transmission of the written word enabled humanity to become a collective intelligence of sorts, individually we aren't that smart.

[notahacker]

Our communication and experimentation was sufficiently far ahead of other advanced mammals to cause mass extinction events long before writing came into play. (It's debatable whether some fairly advanced civilizations even had "writing" in the sense of general symbolic communication)

"Just enough better" is doing a lot of work when that leads to space travel and computers and inventing reasons to feel bad about our phenomenally efficient expansion and predation, whilst members of other species prove extremely limited at acquiring human knowledge even when we're expressly trying to share it with them.