How can I tell if stone age aliens are sapient?

Let's say I have been chosen to evaluate whether or not alien worlds contain sapient life before we terraform them. Just assume that we learned to work together and live as a species in peace, treating intelligent life equally (though in reality we never will).

Obviously this is a hard job and since I don't want to be fired, I can't make a mistake. This becomes even harder when I look at all the possibilities of stone age intelligence. Tool use is not a trait that is exclusive to sapient animals, after all. If the species was a sapient plant, I couldn't use earthly evolutionary rules. If they had multiple bodies, I couldn't rely on the rules of monobodied aliens.

And these are just aliens that can be explained. For more extreme cases, it becomes impossibly difficult to tell. How can I, to within reasonable doubt, determine whether or not an alien species at a stone age level of evolution is sapient?

posted almost 8 years ago

Uncle Tres‭

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