What distinguishes us from animals?

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What distinguishes us from animals? The answer is: our mental abilities. But scientists have had great difficulty in identifying the faculties that make us so special, especially as recent research has shown that many animals, from birds to chimpanzees, have certain cognitive skills that compete with ours. Last year, to cite just one example, Mathias Osvath and Can Kabadayi of Lund University, Sweden, boldly claimed that Great Crows (Corvus corax) can plan actions in advance at same as us. In their experience, they first taught five birds to pick up a stone and throw it in a box in exchange for a reward. Subsequently, the crows were able to recover the stone themselves, hidden in the middle of a pile of other objects, several minutes and even hours before the box announcing the reward was made available to them. The researchers concluded that crows knew how to project themselves into the future.