Our communication and experimentation was sufficiently far ahead of other advanced mammals to cause mass extinction events long before writing came into play. (It's debatable whether some fairly advanced civilizations even had "writing" in the sense of general symbolic communication)
"Just enough better" is doing a lot of work when that leads to space travel and computers and inventing reasons to feel bad about our phenomenally efficient expansion and predation, whilst members of other species prove extremely limited at acquiring human knowledge even when we're expressly trying to share it with them.
"Just enough better" is doing a lot of work when that leads to space travel and computers and inventing reasons to feel bad about our phenomenally efficient expansion and predation, whilst members of other species prove extremely limited at acquiring human knowledge even when we're expressly trying to share it with them.