The world is filled with many religions. You can have your own opinions on that if you like, but religions are a way that bring people together. What we haven't seen before is how it can bring animals together, and that's because we assume they don't have religion at all.
However, new evidence coming out of some West African countries suggest that chimpanzees have developed their own worship system and it's actually pretty fascinating.
Cí´te d'Ivoire (the Ivory Coast), Liberia, and Guinea Bissau are the locations where chimpanzees have been witnessed developing spiritual tendencies. A team of 80 scientists set out to study the behavior and revealed their findings.
"No chimps east of these countries have been observed doing this. What's more, there seems to be no reason for it tied to survival. It has nothing to do with acquiring food, mating, or furthering one's status. Researchers say it might be a unique display of male power, marking the border of their troop's territory, or even a spiritual ritual."
So what exactly are these chimps doing to suggest a religion forming? Find out on the next page!
Cameras were set up in 4 remote locations in an effort to find out the exact regiments the chimps were completing. This is what they found.
Temples and Rituals
The camera captured chimpanzees bringing rocks to a hollowed out tree and storing them there. Then one of the chimps takes a rock, walks an certain distance, grunts, and throws the rock at the tree. The rock gets put back, and the same thing happens later. The distance is the same, the grunt is the same, and the rock is always put back. The scientists believe the grunt could be a type of prayer the chimps are using as part of their budding religion.
"Maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees," Laura Kehoe of the Humboldt University of Berline wrote.
"The ritualized behavioral display and collection of artifacts at particular locations observed in chimpanzee accumulative stone throwing may have implications for the inferences that can be drawn from archaeological stone assemblages and the origins of ritual sites," the study states.
Fire and Rain Dance
Chimps also seem to be aware of a Higher Power that controls the universe. During rain, certain groups of chimps do a ritual rain dance to worship the rainfall. They also acknowledge the power that fire has, doing "a really exaggerated slow-motion display" in front of brush fires. Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University witnessed the "fire dance" in 2006 says she believes chimps have a conceptual understanding of fire, and do the ritual to pay respect to it.
"If chimps with their small brain size can conceptually deal with fire, then maybe we should rethink some of the earliest evidence for fire usage," Pruetz says.
Noises
Aside from the grunting noises during their stone-throwing ritual, chimps in the studied areas have started banging stones together to communicate and start traditions.
"It does seem to be a tradition found in some groups," Pruetz says. "If that fits the definition of proto-ritualistic, I have no problem with it."
"It's such a cool observation," says primate cognitive psychologist Laurie Santos of Yale University. "But I worry that we don't yet know how to interpret it." In my monkey behavior experience, low noises often serve a communicative function "“ males trying to act dominant, etc. "“ so my instinct is that this behavior might work a lot like that," she says.
In all, researchers believe these behaviors, especially the 'sacred trees' are indicators that chimpanzees are starting to develop their own religion.
"Stone accumulation shrines at 'sacred' trees are well described for indigenous West African peoples. Superficially, these cairns appear very similar to what has been described here for chimpanzee accumulative stone throwing sites, thus it would be interesting to explore whether there are any parallels between chimpanzee accumulative stone throwing and human cairn building, especially in regions of West Africa where the local environment is similar."
It's pretty cool to think chimpanzees are developing their own religion, but it's also a little scary. The rituals sound familiar to when humans began evolving. Who knows? Maybe Planet of the Apes wasn't so far off!