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Dolphins may have humans matched on almost every other prerequisite for planetary dominance, but they can’t finish the job because they lack hands.

“Unfortunately, they won’t ever mimic our great metropolises and technologies because they didn’t evolve opposable thumbs,” said Susanne Shultz, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Manchester.

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Schulz is an author on a new study finding that dolphins’ social behaviour is basically an aquatic version of human society. Along with other whales, dolphins give themselves names, they have language dialects, they raise children as a group and they care for their elders.

“Many cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) are also organized in hierarchical social structures and display an astonishing breadth of cultural and prosocial behaviours,” reads the report.

Published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the study was not meant to gauge dolphins’ fitness for global domination. Rather, it’s a neurological study meant to figure out how humans got so smart in the first place.