This isn’t really surprising since studies have shown that thanks to things like tools and fire, humans are able to spend a lot less time eating and gathering food than most other animals do. Basically, because of those two things, we’re able to ‘pre-digest’ food before we stuff it into our pie holes, which means we get more energy out of the food and we don’t need to eat as much as other animals, so that gave us free time to think up things like twerking and the reverse mortgage.
Getting back to this concept, have you read Richard Wrangham's book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human? It details how cooking meat changed our protein intake to make it more efficient and allowed for brain growth. More energy, more intellectual ability so that coupled with group cooperation made hominins the dominant primate. Now there's twerking (modern mating ritual?) and reverse mortgaging so that those of us in our dotage can afford to hang out in a club and learn to twerk? Thank you Miley.
Cap't Jack
Haven't read it, but there's a whole slew of interesting theories that have come out in recent years about how we became so intelligent. One of them has to do with the fact that at about the time we became bipedal, we lost much of our body hair, and this, in turn, enabled our brains to get bigger (more resources available to the ol' gray matter, and we're better able to dump excess heat, so we don't 'cook' ourselves while chasing after game). I doubt we'll ever be able to point to a single thing which made us "human," but I do think we'll be able identify the combination of factors which led to it.