Her cerebral cortex is enormous, holding lessons learned 40 years ago and shuttling them down the line to generations newly born. To knock our homo chauvinism down a peg further, even language is not totally unique to us. Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney have shown that though monkeys don't gush a steady stream of nouns, verbs and sentences, they do erupt with symbolic sounds which act as words. Most famous are the vervets, whose distinctive chutters and whirs warn of killer birds circling the skies, lethal snakes slithering on the ground, and leopards stalking at eyeball height. Even more remarkable is the fact that vervets have more than a single term for each of their dangers.
Every call has synonyms - different sounds with the same meanings.
One more element of human uniqueness anticipated long before we first walked this earth. Those memes, wafting wordlessly through a group, took advantage of conformity enforcers to shape the behavior of a mass. At least two of the elements of the complex adaptive system were at work in mammals long before the appearance of the first Homo sapiens. We'll soon see how the other three petals of the adaptive pentagram were snapping into place as well. Just as they had among bacteria, networking and the group brain were busy doing their thing in the Age of Mammals 60 million years ago.