This is truly a sensation. For the first time, scientists saw the birth of religion not in humans, but in animals! Namely, a group of chimpanzees in Africa, without any sense, began to build cairns of stones in the empty trunks of old trees. Factrum publishes an article giving the details.
Video cameras recorded how everything was happening. Old males approach the “holy” place, throw another stone into the empty tree trunk with a loud cry, and leave with reverence. What is most striking is that after they place the stone, the chimpanzees sway from side to side for several seconds, making completely unusual movements. They seem to be praying or meditating. The journal Scientific Reports writes about this. Scientists believe that chimpanzees invented some kind of religion for themselves, heaps of stones made it a symbol, and empty trunks of old trees became proto-temples.
Photo: Livescience.com
Indeed, large and beautiful stones are apparently the most ancient "temples" of mankind. People still worship individual stones, for example, the Blue Stone on the outskirts of Pereslavl Zalessky. And in antiquity, according to the testimony of ancient authors, there were many such cult stones. They were decorated with wreaths and watered with oil. Piles of stones were sacred, forbidden places in almost all religions, for example, in our North. It is believed that each stone in the heap is the soul of an ancestor. Scientists believe that chimpanzees also throw a stone into a heap when their relative dies.
Religion is considered the main difference between humans and animals. Classical anthropology says that animals abandon their dead and show no interest in them. The appearance of burials, scientists consider the most important sign of the transformation of an animal into a human. But in the case of chimpanzees, we see not even burials (the fact that monkeys grieve for their deceased was known before), but real places of worship.
Thus, religion is characteristic not only of people, but also of animals. Surely in the minds of chimpanzees who build pyramids of stones, there is an idea of some spirits, there are names of these spirits, which means there is a place for abstract concepts of a very high level. It is possible that chimpanzees may even have a science (although early religion and early science are practically the same thing).
What happened, scientists previously simply did not notice religion in animals? Or in our time, for some unknown reason, the rapid development of the mind in monkeys suddenly began? Rather, the first - the discovery became possible thanks to powerful video cameras that work autonomously, and this is a recent invention.
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