Here’s my explanation. All energy ultimately comes from the sun. However so does the lion’s and hyenas, so the question is why are they not as smart? Let’s assume everything initially came from bacteria just as a fast sports car and a wheel barrel both basically come from the mineral called bauxite. A car is smarter than a wheel barrel because of its configuration and thus because of the energy configuration of the hyena’s bacteria it has evolved so, and so did the Homo sapiens. Bacteria must have come in different shapes and sized back in pre-earth anyways, though all pretty much have similar nucleonic components and are thus identical. Think the human face for better understanding; same nose, ears, and eyes but different in color and shapes. This type of differences is called superficial differences, and we still see traces of it today. Of cause every difference is superficial, just depends on your point of reference.The big implication of this is that if humans are the highest energy living beings due to the superficial differences of our own bacteria then safe to draw conclusions that hyenas are definitely also going to be as smart as us, and maybe even walk and talk like Sapiens with sufficient morphology. The biggest implication of this is that there may also be other species on the evolution band wagon; ahead of us, even smarter than us. So the dog you see in the park is maybe about one hundred thousand years away from teaching you mathematics. All this being true if all specie evolved from the same basic bacteria, which is true because as chemistry has the atom and its superficial differentiations into elements so does Biology and the basic cell. If we are getting smarter so should other species if nature is anything close to balanced and fair. Plants were the earliest living species and are still way back on the evolution line. Some of the plants in the Amazon rain forest are amongst the oldest living things on earth. We must have been plants once because we had to manufacture our own food for us to get this far, just as the Homo sapien hunters and gatherers also did most the medieval times. So why are we getting smarter instead of dumber? Well it’s like a domino effect, ideas usually lead to further ideas and the chain never stops(the chain, not homo sapiens). Like many things surviving is an opportunity, especially in biology. Many late extinct species are not able to do anything about humans because they lacked the capacity to at the time. Intelligence is like a pendulum, its swinging but only for a while per specie.