How did humans manage to invent, make and manufacture so much compared to that of other animals?

https://www.livescience.com/7968-human-evolution-origin-tool.html

The ability to make and use tools dates back millions of years in our family tree. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, can on their own devise spear-like weapons for hunting and create specialized tool kits for foraging ants, suggesting our family tree may have possessed wooden tools since the ancestors of humans and chimps diverged some 4 million years ago.

The dawn of stone tools dates back some 2.6 million years to Gona in Ethiopia. Known as the Oldowan, these include not just fist-sized hunks of rock for pounding, but also the first known manufacture of stone tools — sharp flakes created by knapping, or striking a hard stone against quartz, obsidian, flint or any other rock whose flakes can hold an edge. At this time are also the oldest known butchered animal bones.

"So the hominids at this time, based on all the evidence that we have, had small australopithecine-sized brains, but nevertheless they figured out how to cut through often tough hide to efficiently get the meat off the bones and break the bones open for the marrow," said paleoanthropologist Henry Bunn at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

This was the extent of the technology for nearly a million years.

A great advance in technology — the Acheulean

Jump ahead to roughly 1.8 million years ago and both technology and our lineage have changed.

"You now have rough hand axes and cleavers," Wynn said. "The technology is really different, more sophisticated in a cognitive way than anything earlier hominids or chimpanzees could do — some see cognitive abilities to coordinate spatial and shape information that chimpanzees don't have. This is the beginning of what we call the Acheulean."

At about that time, Homo erectus has emerged.

I find it weird why we are the only ones who dance to music too. You never see a cat or dog tapping their paw or bobbing their head in time with the music.

Language, analytical and creative thinking gave us the ability to organize ourselves around fictitious narratives (religion, culture, politics) into large groups in order to work together for a common cause (war, agriculture, cities, etc.).

"“Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.”
— Yuval Noah Harari, author of "Sapiens"

humans have a neocortex which dwarfs that of any other animal, save the cetaceans. also, their lack of pre-adaptation for predation, with their pre-adaptation for experimentation (seen also in monkeys/apes) leading to a predatory niche, made for a developmental arc that selected for technology.

If you study the human brain, and what anthropologists and paleontologists have studied for over a century, it makes sense.

Humans have the most advanced brains on the planet (all jokes aside). We are naturally inclined to be curious and to experiment. Like the lesser primates, we figured out how to use tools, make better ones, and to adapt to our environment in ways that were more advanced than the other animals. It's pretty much 25,000-35,000 (maybe more) years of trial and error.

If you watch babies developing (from a mental and behavioral standpoint), you can see them trying to figure things out, just as our ancestors did many millennia ago. They watch and learn, as the Cro Magnons and Neanderthals did. Succeeding generations built on what their parents and grandparents had learned and figured out, and it led to human advancement in succeeding years.

YEAH! And how did cheetahs manage to run so much faster than other animals? I'm just intellectually curious, etc, and whatnot.

Brains and an opposable thumb. Duh.

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