Chimp & See Talk

Chimp sacred spaces

  • Batfan by Batfan

    I've just been watching a Chris Packham programme, in which one of the items was about chimps in West Africa. These chimps regularly throw stones at certain trees, and it was suggested that this might possibly be some early form of 'religious' ritual, taking place within a sacred space.
    This is not something that I've heard about before and I was wondering if a) this is a phenomenon that has credence within the scientific community and b) has this behaviour been observed at any of the C&S sites? It's quite possible that this is a well established behaviour, about which I've just never heard but it sounds really interesting and I'm curious to find out more.

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  • AnLand by AnLand moderator

    Hi @Batfan,

    while waiting for an answer from the science team (who authored this paper!), here the discussion we had earlier about that: https://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000m/discussions/DCP0000s5i

    and this is the Stone throwing collection from our videos here: https://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/collections/CCPL0000oe

    Enjoy!

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  • Batfan by Batfan

    Thanks for that @Anland. The clips are great and the paper looks really interesting. I've only had time to just skim it so far, but will read it in more detail later.

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  • MimiA by MimiA scientist, moderator

    Hi @Batfan, how super depressing that you're involved with the scientists who published that paper and you didn't even know 😦 Popular science really gets frustrating for us some times! 😦

    I'm gonna get @akalan to reply to you since this is a major topic of her research and she is just about ready to head back to the field for her follow up study 😃

    and of course, please ask all the questions you have (if you have any) if you go through the paper 😃

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  • akalan by akalan scientist

    Hi @Batfan, yes that Packham show aired some of the footage published in our paper and a few more videos from these sites. We were not privy to how they were going to use it as they did not interview us. Our paper is indeed the first time this behaviour has been described and it is startling that it does not occur at more sites where chimpanzees occur. Please read the paper for the scientific hypotheses we propose (not mutually exclusive): a) that this is a modification of the buttress drumming behaviour for communication among chimpanzees, and b) that the sites could be associated with particularly important resources for the chimps in their environment, or c) potentially have a symbolic nature where those sites represent territorial boundaries for example. This is where the media has unfortunately taken our mention of the accumulation of stones at trees as a precursor to ritual sites in the paper and associated this with religion. At the moment one can only speculate but I'll be going to the field next week to find out more, so I hope to have more data to address our hypotheses. Stay tuned!

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  • Batfan by Batfan in response to akalan's comment.

    Hi @MimiA and @akalan
    Thanks so much for your responses. Have just had a first reading of your paper @akalan and it looks super interesting - I'm a bit out of practice with reading scientific articles, so I think I'll need to give it a second reading before I've taken it all in properly, but I shall certainly do that. I'm looking forward to hearing any further ideas that come out of your field work Have fun!

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