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Since antiquity, philosophers have argued that higher mental abilities -- in short, thinking and language -- are the great divide separating humans from other species. The lesser creatures, Rene Descartes contended in 1637, are little more than automatons, sleepwalking through life without a mote of self- awareness. The French thinker found it inconceivable that an animal might have the ability to "use words or signs, putting them together as we do." Charles Darwin delivered an unsettling blow to this doctrine a century ago when he asserted that humans were linked by common ancestry to the rest of the animal kingdom. Darwinism raised a series of tantalizing questions for future generations: If other vertebrates are similar to humans in blood and bone, should they not share other characteristics, including intelligence? More specifically, did the earliest humanlike creatures, who split from the ancestors they shared with apes between 5 million and 7 million years ago, already possess a primitive ability to form plans, manipulate symbols, plot mischief and express sentiments?

Subtle refinements in brain architecture, rather than large-scale alterations, make us smarter than other animals. (Scientific American)

" Dennett is the great demystifier of consciousness. According to him there is, in the final analysis, nothing fundamentally inexplicable about the way we attribute intentions and conscious feelings to people. We often attribute feelings or intentions metaphorically to non-human things, after all. We might say our car is a bit tired today, or that our pot plant is thirsty. At the end of the day, our attitude to other human beings is just a version - a much more sophisticated version - of the same strategy. Attributing intentions to human animals makes it much easier to work out what their behaviour is likely to be. It pays us, in short, to adopt the intentional stance when trying to understand human beings. "

Osvath et al. Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and orangutan (Pongo abelii) forethought: self-control and pre-experience in the face of future tool use. Animal Cognition, 2008 DOI: 10.1007/s10071-008-0157-0

Neuroscientist Terence Deacon argues that the emergence of symbolic capacities unique to language were a key factor in the evolution of the human brain, and are a key to distinguishing human from animal forms of communication, ways of learning and brain s

"The research in the journal Nature Neuroscience by Professor Seth Grant, Head of the Genes to Cognition Programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, suggests that it is not size alone that gives more brain power. Instead, he found that, during evolution, increasingly sophisticated molecular processing of nerve impulses - notably by providing more connections in the brain - allowed development of animals with more complex behaviours. " (Telegraph)

"..We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens--a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and the destinies they force upon us than any other animal ... a creature capable of steering our own evolution..."

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild.

Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years-an eye-blink of evolution.

"Yes, we're a lot like other primates, particularly the great apes, with whom we have more than 98 percent of our genes in common. Yet elaborate displays of apparent maternal grief like Gana's may reveal less about our shared awareness of death than our shared impulse to act as though it didn't exist." - NYTimes.com