We can and do make nonhuman mammals sit and repeatedly do tasks all day even when rewarded. Neuroscience behavior experiments in rats, mice, and apes are exactly this.
Humans are considered much less exceptional than they were in the 1950s.
I'd say our big edge over other species is the scale of our social networks. For example, apes can have economies where they trade currency, but that economy is going to be limited to a single tribe.
> We can and do make nonhuman mammals sit and repeatedly do tasks all day even when rewarded.
I have never seen a study showing this. Where did you get this data from? You can make nonhuman mammals follow their instincts all day, but we can't extract much value from that. You can't make them do arbitrary tasks that are physically and mentally within their means all day. You can train animals to do a task once easily, but you can't train it to continue doing said task for the entire day so it can get fed by the end of the day.
Humans are considered much less exceptional than they were in the 1950s.
I'd say our big edge over other species is the scale of our social networks. For example, apes can have economies where they trade currency, but that economy is going to be limited to a single tribe.