Here is a recent TED talk that I find amazingly insightful: Ted Talk

Similar to concepts explored in Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance theory, it seems that the bird behavior demonstrated in this video is a kind of mass consciousness evolution.  As more birds 'figure out' how to do X or Y, it spreads thru the bird population as a whole. And, as in the case of the monkey's washing their food, further research would likely show that the learned behaviors are being demonstrated in bird populations a great distance from each other.

If our brain and nervous system function as transceivers, sending and receiving information to and from a greater conscious awareness, learned behaviors could spread through populations of various species via mechanisms beyond direct observation and teaching.

There is a phenomena refered to as "Multiple Simultaneous Invention" which appears to be an example of this phenomena in humans. The following is reposted from thelongnose.com:

We know this because at least 23 other people built prototype light bulbs before Edison¹, including two groups who fought legal battles with him over the patent rights (Sawyer and Mann in the U.S. and Swan in England)²....  This is not a strange coincidence that happened with electric lighting, it is the norm in both technological invention and scientific discovery. Newton and Leibniz independently invented calculus, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both filed a patent for the telephone on the same day — within three hours of each other — and sunspots were simultaneously discovered by four scientists living in four different countries. The list of simultaneous independent inventions includes the airplane (2 people), the steamboat (5 people), the telegraph (5 people), and the telescope (9 people). In science and math it includes decimal fractions (2 people), the theory of natural selection (2 people), the discovery of oxygen (2 people), and the conservation of energy (4 people)³.

So, in the same way schools of fish and flocks of birds act in unison without having to "think" about it, due to the greater conscious awareness that is informing the species as a whole, the same type of phenomena could be happening with the human species as well. That idea becomes more plausible when watching the movie Koyaanisqatsi, and seeing how from a much larger perspective our collective actions are not unlike the routine of ants.

Reincarnation implies that it is our soul or greater conscious awareness that is learning with each successive life experience, growing and evolving as we have more exposure to life. And, it seems that same idea also applies to the larger awareness that is the collective consciousness of each species, where each life form contributes to the growth and evolution of the whole species.

We are human beings, but more than that we are soul consciousness having a human experience. And, thru our life experience we are not only contributing to the learning and growth of our own soul, we are also contributing to the growth and expansion of the human species as a whole. When looking at things from this perspective, we as individuals aren't nearly as important as we would like to believe; but then again we are more important than we can comprehend. We are one of many, but we also contribute to the greater whole.