Seeing Spirituality in Chimpanzees
Barbara J. King at The Atlantic reports on evidence of spirituality in chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans. Scientists have observed chimpanzees engaging in repeated rituals, leading some to speculate that they may have sense of the divine. ““People will always debate what is and isn’t sacred, what counts and what doesn’t count as religious,” said Donovan Schaefer of Oxford University. “But if we encountered a group of humans who returned to the same trees over and over and performed the same inexplicable action near them and didn’t seem to have any practical reason to do so, there would be lots of people who would interpret it through the prism of religion.”