[nn3]

chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans evolved intelligence too. They are smarter than most other critters in the jungle. Just all not as much as the lineage that leads to humans.

It's actually quite difficult to define human intelligence. Every time we think we find something unique by humans eventually some animal turns up that can do it too. It may be all just a question of degree and how it's used.

[yongjik]

From what I've heard, language is unambiguously unique to humans, if you consider grammar an integral part of languages. You can teach chimpanzees hand signs, but they could never make the leap to stringing them together under a coherent rule: something like the difference between "Mom give me cookies" vs "I give mom cookies."

(I'm no expert, so take that with a grain of salt.)

[timschmidt]

Cetacean communication obeys Zipf's law: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11797547/

As does house finches: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.202...

Sperm whale codas exhibit contextual and combinatorial structure: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8

Ants have developed symbolic language: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10093743/

Everywhere we look close enough, we find life doing smart things.

[andsoitis]

Those are interesting examples. Do you know of a species where ALL of those properties (and more) exist?

[timschmidt]

Likely all of the ones named, and more. These are just a sampling of papers and not at all exhaustive.

[nylonstrung]

Bee "dance" communication is remarkably sophisticated and precise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance?wprov=sfla1

[adgjlsfhk1]

proto-grammers are fairly common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot) for example shows that parrots are capable of understanding English word order to some extent.

[rishav_sharan]

Don't think so. Whales and dolphins seem to have a fairly sophisticated language with regional dialects and accents.

[whimsicalism]

Unique to modern humans, maybe. But that's only because we outcompeted/killed all of our sibling species that also spoke language. Denisovans likely had language as well.

[droopyEyelids]

Are there any other animals that have a system of writing?

[AngryData]

No, but humans didn't have writing up until pretty recently either so I don't think that is a great measure of base intellectual capability.

[makeitdouble]

The interesting part is how do you research that.

Starting from what should be considered "writing" to how to identify specific artifacts as abstract words.

Some researchers spend years in the forest studying one animal to isolate one single word they're speaking. Understanding other kind of intelligences is a crazy complex task.

[nradov]

Researchers have taught primates to communicate using sequences of simple symbols. It's sort of like a system of writing but very primitive.

[dyauspitr]

Not even close.

Some great apes can learn to use symbols for communication. Bees can use specific dances to indicate direction and distance.

[victorbjorklund]

I dont think any other animal even have language at all (at least not language like we use the word language)