Chimp's religion?

[Fake Messiah]

Primatologists have observed that some chimpanzees are filling hollow trees with rocks. Why they would do this has few explanations, like maybe they are marking their territory, but other is that they are building shrines out of hollow trees and filling them with rocks to, in a way, worship trees.

From an article:

But what we discovered during our now-published study wasn’t a random, one-off event, it was a repeated activity with no clear link to gaining food or status – it could be a ritual. We searched the area and found many more sites where trees had similar markings and in many places piles of rocks had accumulated inside hollow tree trunks – reminiscent of the piles of rocks archaeologists have uncovered in human history.
Videos poured in. Other groups working in our project began searching for trees with tell-tale markings. We found the same mysterious behavior in small pockets of Guinea Bissau, Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire but nothing east of this, despite searching across the entire chimp range from the western coasts of Guinea all the way to Tanzania.
[…]
maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees. Indigenous West African people have stone collections at “sacred” trees and such man-made stone collections are commonly observed across the world and look eerily similar to what we have discovered here.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/nat...e-religion

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