No offense, but literally what the fuck are you talking about?

Well, what was so special about Homo Sapiens Foo that they should become The Next Big Thing on the planet?

At first, they are just another bunch of naked primates, with inherent disadvantages of big brain (needs more food, and not only glucose) in big head (leads to more fatalities by birth).

So there seem to be 3 big thresholds to clear:

1. Manifest enough of advantages over the next bunch of monkeys to consistently more than compensate for those disadvantages. That’s what it takes to keep a new trait, biologically speaking.

2. Be resilient. Adaptations are needed because something always happens. If only because weather patterns oscillations on ~100-1000 years scale exist.
Those who adapt and survive while the competitor can only die out or migrate would naturally own the changed territory without one more competitor. Which leads to the next big step.

3. Actively expand into new biomes.

There’s a bootstrap problem: to be optimized for new conditions by basic evolutionary pressures, a stable population should already survive there for a long while.

So (1) is why modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens is little different from a Cromagnon man. But (3) was the real test to become The Next Big Thing: jump to more than surviving yet another bad year or doing the same slightly better. It almost certainly took more than clever monkeys learning new tweaks of simple tricks from each other. The earliest qualitatively new capability known to us were tools, using knife and fire. So it makes sense that’s what expansion leveraged: making things that increase resilience.

No offense, but literally what the fuck are you talking about?

…and yet we remain human after millions of years.

Biological advantage of sentience can be expressed simply as “upgrade from adaptation only via slow hardware evolution to much faster software evolution”.

Evolution of memeplexes via mutation and branching off (ethnogenesis) is a replacement for evolution of subspecies via mutation and branching off.

Once it hit tool building stage, evolutionary pressures simply had very little effect. Which is why humans remain mostly good old cromagnon. With very few dead ends in areas of high radiation and tough environment, like bushmen: amazing in their terrain, but downgraded nearly to useless souvenirs outside it.

Which is why trekkie types with their “planet of hats” meme are utterly retarded. In strict terms, it’s a failure to take advantage of sapience.

And so is the Protestant narcissism underlying the trekkie idiocy, of course.

“and there ends your absorption of the talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, ‘This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.’ You say your civilisation will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus?

— The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Speaking of Nicaragua, even the milder Catholic narcissism that gave birth to this proved to be not much better in a great natural experiment. The “total unity” and “colorblindness” were tried in colonial Mesoamerica, and worked right until their celebrated obsolescence of good fences somehow resulted in failure of good neighborhoods and a bloodbath.