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The Magic of Metaphors
Spoken language is a tool that humans have capitalized on to thrust our species to the top of the food chain but, as is obvious, we are not the only animal species that have developed verbal means of communication. We humans might not be able to interpret what dogs, dolphins, and donkeys are saying to one another but it is clear that they understand the verbal and non-verbal (body language and microexpressions) physical cues of their own kind.
There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of physical differentiators that separate homo sapiens from other animal species, but one of the biggest (if not the biggest) influence that supported our rise to the dominant position within the animal kingdom stems from our unique ability to imagine a world in which the future is different than the present.
This is an oversimplification of a highly complex notion but it takes an immense amount of mental ability and cognitive energy to predict potential scenarios and plan for a future world that may or may not satisfy your needs.
Due to the intensity of this “future planning” stress, there is no evidence that any other animal species ever engage in meaningful forethought prior to acting. Human beings are a highly evolved species, but we are still only a few iterations away from Savannah Chimps (unless you don’t subscribe to the theory of evolution- in which case…
