>>12805324We are only slightly smarter. The main difference is communication and complex social behavior. When it comes to humans, the part of the brain pretaining to language, is significantly larger in proportion than any other animal, as is the part responsible for forward planning.
Basically we are the monkeys thet survived by relying more and more on coordinating our attacks, and communicating. This gave us the ability to pass down information from one generation to the next efficiently.
There were other hominids, who were larger and sotronger than us, as were most simians, thanks to better communication, and complex social behavior we had larger tribes, and better tax, so we fucked everything else up.
From our perspective this seems to be the best survival strategy, but if we consider biomass or population size and density or survivability of the species as metrics for success, most bacteria, and a lot of arthropods and a lot of archea and a shitton of microbes and plants have us beat.