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Chimps, our closest living relatives, do not possess any form of complex communication. Chimps have a set of about 66 different gestures which they use to communicate with one another, and those gestures mean very very simple things.

"The vagueness of the gesture meanings suggest either that the chimps have little to communicate, or we are still missing a lot of the information contained in their gestures and actions. Moreover, the meanings seem to not go beyond what other less sophisticated animals convey with non-verbal communication."

the main difference between ourselves and Chimps is language. Specifically: The ability to communicate about things which are happening at times other than now. When our ancestors left the trees for the Savannah, they encountered an environment where without the ability to communicate and coordinate as a team they would not survive. Chimps ancestors stayed int he safety of the trees and needed only to be able to quickly react when a predator began to scale their tree or came near them. They had easy escapes, we did not.

Evolution isn't magic. Things have to develop from other things. It's an adaptation, not creation. Brains do not like to grow bigger to develop brand new structures, those structures are simply repurposed as needed to fit a new environment. The difference between a human brain and a chimp brain is we traded hyper-detailed short-term memory for hyper-detailed communication. There's a trade-off in the biology of great apes, Good Communication for Good Short-term memory.

This trade-off is the key to sapience due to what good communication allows a species to do. We can understand ideas that begin with concepts like "maybe" and "if". Humans can discuss hypothetical and abstract concepts and events, in detail. Because of this, we can plan for the future and learn far more from the past than would otherwise be possible. As far as we know, no other animal is capable of this.

The capacity for imagining the future is unique. It is THE definitive human skill. That is what we do. Snakes poison. Cheetahs run fast. Birds fly. Fish swim. Humans imagine.

Human imagination is the key to everything. It's why while other species make tools, no other species has made such a simple tool as a bow, or an atlatl, or even a proper knife. These are all simple machines, devices so simplistic they are almost a single part, a lever, a wedge, a spring. That's all those things are. Human children playing in the woods can make crude versions of these things, and will if you let them.

Seeing as how the knife is literally just a narrow wedge and you can find sufficiently pointy rocks laying around, chimps relay have no excuse for not figuring that one out unless they lack the capacity to imagine. They have had just as long as humans to work out "Hey, if we make more pointed rocks like this one, we can use them to cut things like logs so we can get grubs more easily." and have been unable to do so.

Meanwhile, here I am, a human, and I am using an extremely complicated geometric pattern etched into a special kind of crystal to channel a fundamental universal energy in just the right way to turn my finger's moments into letters which you can read anywhere in the world. Our species have had the same amount of time on this world, and are nearly identical in every single way, and yet they are not even in the stone age while we are literally wizards who don't understand we perform magic every single day.

We are gods when compared to every other animal, and yet most of us don't even realize this because our abilities are so mundane and normal to us. I do not speak in jest. Humans can move rivers, bring untold devastation to any region of the globe we choose, slip free from the bonds of gravity to fly from place to place without wings of our own, voyage among the stars, and speak to people too far away to hear our voices.

All of this, thanks to language and the capacity to imagine the future, so we can prepare for the dangers of tomorrow.

Imagination does another thing aside from keeping us safe and allow us to live more comfortably. It allows us to be entertained. We can understand the concept of a story, that something being said is not real but is a fantasy meant to entertain. No other animal can do this. They cannot understand hypothetical scenarios. This ability is, so far as we can tell, uniquely human.

Or rather, uniquely a feature of hominids. Some of the very first ancestors of the human species to split off from Chimps must have been capable of this. We are the only surviving hominids, but we know our extinct brothers and sisters could communicate too. We have found Neanderthal paintings. We have found non-human hominid artifices which show they had a culture, produced art, and had societies which are like our own. They too had the gift of language, imagination.

In short, storytelling was almost certainly the very first art form. Ever.

This makes stories even more special than they already are. They are not merely a form of entertainment but are arguably the very first form of entertainment hominids developed. They are uniquely the product of sapient minds, which in the modern world makes them uniquely human. No other life form known to us possesses the capacity to understand something isn't real and isn't supposed to be, as it is meant simply to entertain.

The fact that humans can distinguish fantasy from reality is one of the most primal and basic parts of our very species. Storytelling is an art form and tradition that is not only older than civilization, not only older than our species but is actually the key to sapience itself. It is what makes us human. The capability to tell and understand stories IS humanity.

Storytelling is the only thing humans do which has any right to be called sacred.