Sure, just like many other animals exhibit analytical intelligence and complex communication. The seeds are there. The distinction is by degree, but the gap is pretty wide in all three cases.

No other species has been shown to systematically display non-kin, non-mating-system altruism (for which empathy is probably an integral component). It seems likely you need systematic non-kin altruism to achieve the ubiquitous, complex cooperation humans exhibit. And that complex cooperation is probably a prerequisite to make our degree of intelligence evolutionarily profitable. Otherwise human-level intelligence should be more common than our immediate lineage. (Some cousin species may very well have been smarter or more cooperative than us; relatively speaking it could be homo sapiens found a more effective equilibrium. Nonetheless our immediate lineage seems to be the only one to break through the selfish gene bottleneck that restricts other species along these axes.)