Video footage has emerged that scientists believe could prove chimpanzees believe in God.
Laura Kehoe, PhD researcher in wildlife at the University of Humboldt in Berlin, found a group of wild chimpanzees engaging in what could be religious rituals in the Republic of Guinea.
She set up a camera trap after strange markings on a tree were spotted by her local guide, Mamadou Alioh Bah.
Writing for Scientific American's, The Conversation, Kehoe explained she was on her first field mission in the savannahs of the Republic of Guinea. Her aim was to record and understand a group of wild chimpanzees who had never been studied before. "These chimps are not lucky enough to enjoy the comforts of a protected area, but instead carve out their existence in the patches of forests between farms and villages," she said.
The battery-powered cameras her team used were triggered by movement.
"What we saw on this camera was exhilarating – a large male chimp approaches our mystery tree and pauses for a second. He then quickly glances around, grabs a huge rock and flings it full force at the tree trunk," she wrote.
"Nothing like this had been seen before and it gave me goose bumps."
Wild chimps were first discovered using tools by Jane Goodall in the 1960s. Chimps are known to use twigs, leaves, sticks and even spears in order to get food. Stones have also been used to crack open nuts and cut open large fruit.
But what Kehoe and her colleagues found was not a random event but something she believes could have been a ritual.
They searched the area and found many piles of rocks inside hollow tree trunks, which she wrote were "reminiscent" of the piles of rocks archaeologists have uncovered in human history. Other groups looked for and found similar behaviour by chimps elsewhere.
Kehoe admitted the rock throwing could be no more than male "display" behaviour with the aim of making a loud noise.
It could also be territorial marking.
"Even more intriguing than this, 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," she wrote.
