A wild untrained human animal isn't that bright. We can probably operate above the crow level, but maybe not by much.
What makes us special is persistent collective learning and abstract communication.
Unlike animals, generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems. As a species we have cumulative persistent memory for techniques and abstractions. That's the real game changer.
But it took a surprisingly long time - tens of thousands of years - for our brains to make this ability central to culture. And there's no guarantee that if we re-ran history we'd do it again on the same scale.
What makes us special is persistent collective learning and abstract communication.
Unlike animals, generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems. As a species we have cumulative persistent memory for techniques and abstractions. That's the real game changer.
But it took a surprisingly long time - tens of thousands of years - for our brains to make this ability central to culture. And there's no guarantee that if we re-ran history we'd do it again on the same scale.