You are quite right of course, I failed to make myself clear. I agree I was somewhat too wild and vague in a generalisation. I was trying to compress a long evolution into short compass.
Mammals run in herds, termites have colonies and whales run in pods.
Even an ecology is an interactive system but that works more like a democracy which although ours is called that we can hardly say it is. Quite when and how the hominid changed into a humanoid is not exactly clear. Much of all this happened when Narmer of Egypt, C'i of China and Asoka of India made empires and wrote down laws. But for this a whole set of causal features have to be already present so this can happen. One gorilla in the New York zoo asked for a kitten for Christmas.