The thing is, it's not that hard for an animal (or a machine) to do one thing that we do, sometimes even to do it better than we do. But doing everything that we do, in the same package, is really, really hard.
The thing that blows my mind about humans is how adaptable our bodies are to virtually any task, terrain, climate, etc.
Goats are, in general, much better climbers than humans. But the best human climbers are WAY better than the best goat climbers. For example, I've never seen a goat climb El Cap.
Beavers, on average, are much better dam builders than humans. But the best human dam builders are WAY better than the best beaver dam builders.
One thing I feel doesn't get as much hype compared to intelligence is just how versatile our metabolism is. Animals often have very narrow selection of what they can use for food, and adapting to different kind of food source is very difficult. Humans though can feed on almost everything, plants, meat, raw, cooked, carb-, fat-, or protein-heavy - not all of it is equally good for us, but our digestion system will take whatever you throw at it and be fine mostly.
Indeed. Orcas are found all over the world, from the tropics to near the poles, in more climates than nearly every other animal in the wild -- but they are still only #2 in terms of climate adaptability. #1 is humans.
As for building dams, beavers evolved to build dams. They build dams because they're beavers. When humans build dams, it's because at some point in the past, some humans somewhere intuited that a dam would bring benefits (perhaps more water for fishing), figured out how to build one, and passed that knowledge onto other humans who were otherwise cognitively completely unprepared to build dams. As the knowledge was passed on, ways to improve the dam-building procedures were invented, and better tools were developed and used, to the point where the average human-built dam far exceeds even the best beaver dam. That makes the human story even more compelling.
Tying it back to the OP, we've seen that humans can train bees to associate symbols with counts, and that's remarkable. But if we find evidence of bees spontaneously inventing numeracy in the wild, and teaching it to other bees, that would be really something. And we'd better get ready to welcome our new insect overlords.
