Chimps and the Zen of Falling Water

““I can’t help feeling that this waterfall display, or dance, is perhaps triggered by feelings of awe and wonder,” says Goodall in the video. “The chimpanzee brain is similar to ours. They have emotions that are clearly similar to those that we call happiness and sadness and fear and despair and so forth. So why wouldn’t they also have feelings of some kind at spirituality? Which is, really, being amazed at things outside yourself.””

“What might water evoke in a being capable of rich abstraction, eminently aware of water’s vitality, but with a different and less mechanistic body of knowledge? Suddenly it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to imagine chimps experiencing some seed of what, in Homo sapiens, eventually grew into water myths found in just about every human society.”

““I think chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are, but they can’t analyze it,” Goodall says in the video. “You get the feeling that it’s all locked up inside them, and the only way they can express it is through this fantastic rhythmic dance.” Maybe these waterfall dances—and also similar dances she’s observed at the start of sudden, seasonal downpours—will someday give rise to animistic proto-religion, imbuing falling water with existential meaning. Perhaps they already have.”