environment.  Through the use of words human beings establish principles, laws and values.  Through the use of words we exchange ideas and knowledge.
    Like God, words give us enormous creative power.  This creative power is something we often do not understand or effectively use.  many times we take this ability for granted, yet it is in the image of God.
    Humans are self-aware, self-questioning.  Animals do not have this kind of self-consciousness.  Human beings dream of Heaven and fear hell.  Human beings consciously create music and art.  Human beings create and need stories.  They seek to be fascinated and to satisfy fascination.  It is the spirit of man that sets him apart, not his body.

    "And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being (or a living soul)"  Genesis 2:7.

    Other creatures of human-like appearance existed.  Why God created them, only He knows.  The theory set out by some stating that God would plant false geological and fossil records does not jibe with the character of God.  God cannot lie (Hebrews 6:18).  These human-like creatures did exist, but they did not possess the breath of God; they did not have eternal spirits.
    Ian Tattersall writes in the January 2000 issue of Scientific American that
hominids other than H. sapiens left no evidence of "symbolic behaviors," that is making art, having worship or special concern for their dead.  Neanderthal burials do not have the "grave goods" that attest to a belief in the afterlife ". . . Neanderthals . . . lack the spark of creativity that, in the end, distinguished H. sapiens"  (page 61).  This "spark of creativity" is the breath of God.  It's man's eternal spirit and it sets man apart from all other creatures.