One of the ted talks discusses crows and their ability to adapt to environmental needs using tools. Such as bending a paperclip into a makeshift hook to get food out of a tube. This is prior to any learning from other crows which completely eliminates any social learning construct.
There is also this idea that humans are the most intelligent of the species, which I find incredibly fallible. If anything we may be the least suited in terms of evolutionary intelligence because we do stupid things. Most of the environmental things around us that could kills us are of our own technology.
If you clearly define a species success on it's ability to survive and propagate we have created more problems and obstacles than any other species. Just to cite things like cigarettes, abudance of high caloric food, industrial hazards, etc. Most of these products all in the name of basic instinctual needs that have been "intellectualized" and morphed into other needs.
A person's need to have the right color curtains matching to the color of her room in the grand scheme of all things that are pertinent to survival is way down on the list. Yet you find people obsessing over extremely minute and useless details as a side effect of higher intelligence. People freak out if there is a dent on there car and some bring it to violence. But how important is a dent in your car with all things considered? Extremely useless. Imagine if a squirrel killed another squirrel because there was a scratch on his tree.
While we believe as a species we are intelligent, it's simply hubris to cover our deficits.
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