Actually, I think we may be more special than you have been imagining, and science is revealing many of these things.
First our unique appearance is from becoming the sparse hair (often called hairless) primates because we evolved as the long distance running hunters due to our cooling system using sweat.
Then we mastered the use of fire to cook food giving us a far more efficient means of acquiring nutrients – and thus giving us more time for other activities.
We domesticated not only plants and animals but ourselves as well in order to capitalize on the most powerful of evolutionary strategies: cooperation.
Finally and most importantly we evolved to use language. And it is important to understand the difference between language and mere communication. Language has representational and abstraction capabilities to rival that of DNA and thus become a medium for life in its own right. This is the life of the human mind which passes on an inheritance to the next generation without the limitation of no inheritance of acquired characteristics. Thus we change significantly on a much shorter timescale than evolution. We are in fact another form of life altogether than the biological (in addition to the biological of course).
P.S. You might notice some of things which I do not mention which have more traditionally been taken as making humans special. These are intelligence and morality. This is because you will find there are some problems with these. In the case of intelligence, there are two difficulties. One is that we lost some of our intelligence when we domesticated ourselves. The second is that we are finding with AI that intelligence isn’t as great or as special as we thought. In the case of morality, I believe we are finding that this is inherent in all communal organisms. You might think that our morality is different and you would be right, but I think it all points back to language and the ability it gives us to master abstractions.
P.P.S. This shift from intelligence and morality as making us special likely has interesting implications for religion as well. You can say that Christianity has been coming recognize the limitations/difficulties of both intelligence and morality also. Consider the problems of legalism and excessive obsession with dogma and even with scripture (for which I can ironically quote John 5:39). And thus we have been shifting to a more experiential understanding (power of Christ to change lives) and the importance of faith.