But they don't have the large frontal cortex that mammals have. Mammal brains are fundamentally different, and the book I, Mammal goes into that in some detail.
That fact wouldn't stop some enterprising writer from writing a book about a kind of dinosaur that was as intelligent as homo sapiens and developed a technological civilization back then. Heck, I've thought about writing just such a novel, but I'm not a good enough writer to pull it off.
The high levels of intelligence attributed to some of the birds still is on the order of a four or five year old human child. Not the genuine complexity of thought and reasoning of an adult human.
Sometimes I like to speculate what kind of civilization might come from highly evolved cats or dogs or elephants or any other creature we might want to think about. All of them have two huge impediments. First is limbs that can manipulate the environment as we can with our hands, especially our opposable thumbs. The other is true language. There are various creatures that have learned a lot of human language, and great apes who have been taught sign language and can communicate appropriately with it, although in a very rudimentary sense. That can't discuss ideas, such as is taking place in this thread. A lot of animals have their own complex system of calls, songs even, that fill important purposes for those animals. But again, they are not capable of considering or discussing abstract ideas. That's not to say that somewhere down the road (a very long way down the road) evolution might produce another animal with the intelligence and anatomy to develop what we call civilization.
I am not simply dismissing all non humans as mere animals, unworthy of respect. I am simply pointing out that the gulf between them and us is huge.
= new reply since forum marked as read