Marvelous, certainly… unique, not necessarily. Some corvids appear capable of passing down skills (tool use) and memories (which humans have harmed previous generations), and just because we lack the ability to understand their stories doesn’t mean dogs, birds, and octopi aren’t passing down just as immense and marvelous communal knowledge via scent, sound, and touch.
As for the written word… I’d call that a running experiment. It’s capable of beauty, certainly… but it’s also capable of Meta (née Facebook) and X (née Twitter). Of course the fact that we can readily coin new terms for new situations — I hereby dub the use of X by its current owner _muskturbation_ — is intrinsically complex, but I’m not sure it isn’t also a direct pathway to both babble and Babble and, ultimately, species-ending atrocity.
