Humans are the only species of social animals to use crude tools to build better tools to any significant extent. This gives human societies a lot more ability to store (and thereby to concentrate) wealth - you can collect far more food for yourself if it won't spoil in a few days, you can only really begin handing down wealth to your children if you have tools which require other tools to build and maintain.

This gives a scope to human politics that is absent in other primate politics.

Then of course comes the invention of long-distance communication and transportation, which adds a geographic scope to the politics. But that's tacked on much later in the evolution of primate politics.

"Social" insects are arguably different, and not particularly social at all, in that the "organism" level is the hive rather than the individual specimen - a worker ant resembles a red blood cell more than it resembles a chimpanzee.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.