All animals have an ability to reason. "If I take out the weakest in the herd I won't have to do as much work," or "If I hide here they won't be able to see me." Now the only animals that contemplate on things like philosophy are humans (that we know of. I don't know what a dolphin is thinking and have a serious fear that the will someday overthrow us. The origin of cognitive thought, though isn't really hard to imagine.
It would have started with a few predatory ancestors deciding that it would be more beneficial to hunt together. Collectively their reasoning skills would have improved and they would start surviving with ease. At some point a natural selection would shift to those with better skills at reasoning and our brains would develop. Keep in mind that this is all taking place over thousands of years and in addition to physical attributes of the brain we'd have a collective knowledge going.
By collective knowledge I mean things that the pack knows. An offspring will learn how to hunt by observing the rest of the pack including her parents. Suppose someone tries something new and it works. Then its added to the collective knowledge and it will be passed on to the offspring and they will pass it on to their offspring, etc. This is basically how a species as a whole learns. Now by some happenstance some primate picked up a rock and used it to club something. He realizes it works and continues to use it. The other members of the pack observe and copy him. Thus tools are born.
Tools become more sophisticated, little by little. They learn what works and what doesn't and they learn how to combine what works into something that works even better. I don't really now how we developed. I'm just using inference. All I know is that at some point we learned that rocks can be used to kill things, that we can eat vegetables when we don't have any meat to eat. That shileding yourself from the elements via either natural formations or makeshift shelters is good. Etc.
As for the development of emotions. At some point we started realizing the values of each other to the clan. This meant that if someone died we knew the clan was weaker. It is from this that I think we started to mourn our fallen. We started to grasp our fellow clan members fleeting existence and we started to look at our own.
I think I've shown that it really isn't that hard to imagine elementary deductive reasoning found in the stupidest of animals evolving into cognitive thought. As for the origin of language. That came about when there was a need to communicate complex ideas to the clan. It started out as murmurs and sreeches like you can hear in monkeys and slowly we accepted common meanings for certain sounds. These common meanings are passed into the collective knowledge and the evolution of language slowly (very slowly) crept forward.
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