The explicit link between awareness and sociality put forward in the accompanying article opens new doors to thinking about the evolutionary origins of consciousness. Human subjective experience undoubtedly has some features that are species-specific and others that are shared over a broad phylogenetic base. The authors' proposal that consciousness depends on high-level neural circuits evolved for social perception begs the question whether animals lacking such circuitry experience a fundamentally different form of consciousness from humans. It also highlights the need for comparative work elucidating neural mechanisms by which animals other than primates perceive and respond to their conspecifics.