I've had some thoughts about that recently. I strongly suspect that evolution kinda forced us to turn out this way, and that any other intelligent species (at least non-telepathic ones) would likely evolve similarly. Telepathy - if actually possible - is the only thing I think would force a significantly different evolutionary path (at the likely cost of individuality).
I'm just some rando who has absolutely zero expertise in this area, so I'm probably wrong. After spending a huge proportion of my life privately trying to understand humans, I have a hard time seeing it happening much differently, tho.