Is "fire" the thing that sets us apart from the rest of the animals?

Question

It hit me that only humans on this planet know how to control and create fire so is that the reason why we progressed and became intelligent species?

Answer 1

it's a whole lot of different things:

language
social organisation
manual dexterity (opposable thumbs, bipedalism freeing the arms, hand-eye coordination)
capacity for abstract thinking
sentience
tool use (combination of abstract thinking and manual dexterity)
relatively long life (this combined with language and strong abstract thinking means we can pass on knowledge to the next generation so they are not starting from scratch)

i suppose there are more but that's off the top of my head. many animals have some of those things, and some exceed the abilities of humans in certain areas but none apparently have a good combination of all of them as we humans do.

Answer 2

Every time that we try to find some one thing that sets humans apart from the rest of the animals we discover an exception.
A number of primates have taken up smoking tobacco from associating with humans. My family owned a monkey that would steal matches and select rocks for a striking surface so he could light his cigarettes. He also had the very dangerous habit of hiding his lit cigarettes when caught smoking.

The only true sign of intelligence is the ability to surf, which we share with several other species.

Answer 3

Fire isn't the thing that caused us to be intelligent...

Fire is just a benchmark on how far the human intelligence had progressed.

I mean the hominids before homo sapiens were pretty smart themselves, just take a look at the chimps, our ancestors were about the same intelligence until they started to consume meat.

What makes humans the major species on earth is our ability to comprehend ideas and --pass them down to other generations--.

This level of communication is what sets humans apart from our more instinctual bretheren.

Answer 4

No, it's because our brains grew bigger rather than more specialized. Hard to say what the actual determiner is as it wasn't nutrition and despite the fire, people still slept when it was dark and were awake when it wasn't.

I'm still of the theory that we developed completely separately from other hominids.

Answer 5

humans have always been humans and what sets us apart from the animals ,which have always been what they are, is that we have souls. God put us in charge of all of the animals because of that. He prizes us above the rest of his creation.

Answer 6

Opposable thumbs!!

Answer 7

how bout self awareness and opposible thumbs

Answer 8

I'm pretty sure it's sunglasses actually.

Answer 9

what about our thumbs baby?