While there are many who doubt that humans evolved from the animal kingdom, we do share many physical traits of animals. Or we could look at it from the other way around: animals share human traits. This is only beginning to be appreciated, especially for such abstractions as the ability to think, to imagine, to be curious, and even to collect what interests them, writes Craig Foster, a South African documentary filmmaker and naturalist, in a New York Times Opinion.

In his piece, Foster describes how an octopus reached out and stole his camera while he was scuba diving. Even more remarkable—the octopus turned the camera around and started photographing Craig and his diving partner! Foster also mentions how a few years earlier an octopus stole his wife’s wedding ring off her finger. He subsequently found that octopus dens bear witness to their love of shiny objects as he found dens that had earrings, bracelets, spark plugs, sunglasses, and even a revolving cylinder that the octopus spun around with its suckers! It’s not so hard to imagine we may soon see octopus, or another species, playing underwater or terrestial video games!

We are in the infancy of understanding the intelligence and human-like behavior of diverse animals but numerous publications in the last few years indicate that many species – birds, mammals, even invertebrates, (probably all species in my opinion) – are more intelligent and curious than ever we believed, as well as living in complex cultures worthy of our investigation.

It’s about time we realize that in terms of their biology and niche and culture, animals are more sophisticated than we give them credit for, and that we can learn a great deal about what it means to be human, and about our humanity, by investigating what it means to be an animal.