Question: how did we become the most advanced race on earth

Austin Elliott answered on 16 Jun 2012:

Hmmm. You need an evolutionary biologist to answer this one properly!

At a guess, the main answers from an evolutionary biology perspective would probably be first, that we did it by evolving a brain (and specifically the parts of the brain that deal with abstract thinking and reasoning, the cerebral hemispheres) that is bigger (relative to our size) than our ape ancestors. Another thing, more recently, was by evolving the ability (which might have partly had to do with the way our voicebox has evolved) to use language to communicate with one another. Other people might also say that the evolution of an opposable thumb, allowing very skilled manipulation of objects (including tools) with our hands, was important.

In evolution, humans are thought to have branched off from our nearest animal relatives, the chimpanzees, somewhere between 2.5 and 6 million years ago – our DNA is about 98.4% identical to that of chimpanzees, by the way – and the ‘fully human’ thumb was probably evolved by about 1-1.5 million years ago, though obviously all primates have hands that are quite similar to ours.

I would probably go for the evolution of human language as the key thing, myself, as it allowed people to pass on knowledge to others, and also down generations, and build on that knowledge as the generations went by. Which is sort of what we still do with scientific discovery.