How might sentience, self-awareness, or consciousness arise through an evolutionary process?

What is already known and well studied is the ability of many animals to "fortell" the future, as a necessary skill for survival. For example, if you are a vole, and you spot an eagle at a distance, you would form a mental picture of the eagle coming after you to eat you unless you made plans to get away. But to have this ability, you must also have the ability to remember the past, i.e. eagles + voles = eagle lunch. Thus, animals have developed memories of complex events in nature, as well as awareness of things like prey ad predators. This is actually the genesis of consciouness, sentience, and self-awareness, as those qualities come in by degrees and not all at once. For example, numerous studies have been done on how animals react when presented with a mirror. The most dense ones aren't even aware of any reflection in the mirror, but most at least do, and usually jump into the conclusion that it is another animal like they. The more aware ones realize that it is a reflection of themselves, and either they are curious about it, or find it irrelevant and just walk away. But man is not the only one that preens before a mirror and even make faces, having fun with the fact it is a reflection of themselves. From this, we can observe the degrees of self-awareness these animals have. Lilkewise, sentience is often ociated with an ability to verbalize, represent, symbolize, or communicate abstract concepts, and again, man is the not the only animal with these qualities, even though man has the most highly developed ability. It is a very safe bet to make that man has not achieved the limit of what's possible with these abilities---consciousness, sentience, and self-awareness--becuase of the obvious fact that many of emotions of people that they take for granted as being fundamental are actually hardwired into our psyches through evolution, so we don't yet quite fully understand ourselves. It leaves open considerable room for further evolution along these lines, and perhaps people of the far future, or even robots, may look back on us as coming up short and not necessarily that self-aware or conscious, or even that smart, and that we were prone to blindly blundering through life and history.