Connecting Class Topics Huzzah! <- also a metaphor

While looking through the Lakoff piece assigned for Monday's discussion, something important came to my mind. It's interesting in the Lakoff research piece the different categories he creates in which we place metaphor and how those aspects are important for understanding. My question is simply this: Is it possible that our collective ability to use and understand the world in metaphor has helped us evolve to where we are today?
Tomasello, in chapter 3, describes some of the major ways in which we as humans differ in learning from other primates. He explains some specific examples, but the inability of other creatures to partake in a simple trifecta learning process between a child, a parent and an object stunts other animals and prevents them from carrying on important information. But what if we, as creatures with advanced languages, use metaphor as a means for helping others to understand our experiences before they occur to the other person. In that way, they can read our mind, understand our emotions attached to an event, and can react like the person who experienced it without doing it ourselves, therefore adding emotional impact to the information and saving it away. For example, we all know that getting a finger bitten off by a snapping turtle must really hurt. But we can understand that if we've never seen a turtle, been bitten by a weaker turtle or met anyone who has had the event happen. We can read it or hear it from someone else who heard it from someone else, and it allows us to understand why we should not do an action without experiencing it; thus saving our fingers.
Perhaps it is our ability to all understand language as a set of metaphor that helps ground it to a universal standard and then helps it mean something to us, even if we've never experienced it. This, in turn, helps set us apart from other animals who must first experience something before they understand.