Maybe our "clients", as David Brin conceived in the Startide series, a companion species we bring to sapience, won't be dolphins or chimpanzees after all.

It might be bears.
Bears get a handle on opening car doors – but could it be their downfall? (The Guardian)

Bears living around humans seem to be learning simple tool use and manipulation of mechanisms, and the learning is persisting across generations. Bears are showing signs of developing primitive eusocial behaviors and a rudimentary culture.

According to a Park Service specialist, “They learn very quickly, if there’s a reward, how to get that,” Another way to look at it: When you offer rewards to a client (human-adjacent) species for learning, you're teaching. The bears aren't just passively "learning".

We seem to be accidentally uplifting bears, kind of like Brin imagined it.

Thanks to podrock for turning me on to EO Wilson's "The Social ColonizationConquest of Earth", where I read about euscociality, and Wilson's view of how it powered humans to where we are today. It really starts when a species has a nest or den in which which multiple families live for multiple generations, and specializing into defense, foraging, reproductive roles, etc.

Bears have dens, but they're not communal. But what if they pick up the powerful lesson of how we live in fixed communal "dens", and adopt that practice too? Will that be enough to put bears on the path to sapience?

Do we really want to compete with intelligent bears?