Evolution and the Giraffe

People often think that evolution is directed towards creating more intelligent species. So why shouldn't we find aliens out there that have big brains? Surely, if it's happened here on earth, it'll happen where else out there as well. But when you look around here on the earth at all the species that are alive to day, you don't find many with long necks. Maybe you can consider certain kinds of dinosars. It doesn't seem like any other species perhaps had the intelligence that we did. There might have been nienithals or chroma man or something like that. i would guess that all of these kind of hominids actually had an intelligent common ancestor. And