And from that perspective, the major difference between humans and animals is that we are just slightly better at organising than they are. Written script, the ability to perfectly capture and preserve commentary, enables intellectual compounding across millennia. That knowledge is probably our biggest advantage as a species and it comes as an offshoot of us using communication to organise ourselves in a flexible way. It isn't that much different from any other pack animal in one sense, the outcomes are just much better.

There are animals that are more cooperative, there are animals that are better working independently. Humans seem to have found a real optimum in how we interact with an odd and malleable mix of independence and cooperation. Even different human civilisations show remarkable variance in material results depending on how they choose to organise themselves.