Other animals have much in common with us: able to navigate their environment, recognize specific objects etc, they have emotions of fear, anger, affection. And

Other animals have much in common with us: able to navigate their environment, recognize specific objects etc, they have emotions of fear, anger, affection. And they have some problem-solving ability. They also have a lot less brain hardware than us - even chimpanzee brains are smaller and are much less folded. So even if they could do what we do, they couldn't do it as well as us. But I think what is special about human intelligence and language is a difference in kind. I'm thinking of the difference between regular grammars, context free grammars, context sensitive grammars and turing equivalent grammars (though the actually demarcation could be quite different). I think it's possible for a creature, far less intelligent than us, to have our level of sophistication in this sense. Unfortunately, without powerful hardware to store all the entities and connections and relate them to the world, it wouldn't help a creature to survive, so I can't see it evolving naturally. If you have very little silicon you're better off devoting it to hardwired reactions, with a little configurability - and not even have recursion.