The winter solstice is once again upon the Northern Hemisphere. Astronomical events were often used to guide activities such as the mating of animals, the sowing of crops and the monitoring of winter reserves of food. What is the solstice? It is an astronomical event caused by the tilt of the earth on its axis and its orbit around the sun. The result in the Northern Hemisphere is the longest night and the shortest day. It also is the first day of winter. As we welcome the shortest day of the year, let’s spend some time learning about how our ancestors honored the first day of winter.
Astronomical events were often used to guide activities such as the mating of animals, the sowing of crops and the monitoring of winter reserves of food.
Astronomical events were often used to guide activities such as the mating of animals, the sowing of crops and the monitoring of winter reserves of food.
A cause for celebration
It’s no coincidence that there are so many holidays around the time of this astronomical event. Since ancient times, people have celebrated the solstice and observed it with a variety of different cultural and religious traditions. Some of these traditions survive even to the present day.
The holiday timing surrounding the winter solstice is rooted in ancient religions. Throughout history, humans have observed this annual milestone and created both spiritual and cultural traditions to honor the “turning of the Sun” after the darkest period of the year.
No matter what our spiritual beliefs, or what part of the world we live, we all share the turning of the sun on the solstices. Winter Solstice on December 21 is the shortest day of the year for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. After the Winter Solstice, each day becomes longer until the longest day of the year arrives around June 21st.
Unlike the equinoxes (equal length of day and night), which last only a single day, the solstices last for 3 days! The winter solstice lasts from December 22nd until December 24th; three days of the shortest daylight, longest night. Then on December 25th, the Earth begins to wobble back the other direction, making it appear that the sun gets higher and higher in the sky.
That's why the ancients of the Northern Hemisphere considered December 25th as the birthday of the sun! The sun "died" on December 22nd and "raised" from the dead or was reborn 3 days later every year on December 25th! (That is why the Christians chose to celebrate the birth of their god on that day! No one really knows for sure when Jesus was born, except the Mormons, who say it was April 6th, but there is no actual physical evidence for that).
Hence the traditions that we so often associate with Christmas are actually winter solstice traditions. Take the example of the Christmas tree. Where did that come from? Well, after many years of searching, I came upon the origin of the Christmas tree completely by accident, and in the most unlikely place: MONGOLIA!
In ancient Egypt, there was the Feast of Aset (Isis), celebrated around the winter solstice. Asar (Osiris) was killed by his jealous brother Set and resurrected by his wife Aset (Isis). Osiris and Isis gave birth to Horus (the younger), who is the personification of the SUN!!!!
Honoring the solstice is something lost to most of us, and it feels deeply meaningful, in a mystical sort of way, to choose to make a glimmer of connection. Here is a winter solstice rite observed by many Native American tribes, and this is where I focus my research. It is a ritual that honors your ancestors, belief system, and a way of offering prayer and gratitude:
Prayer sticks are made by everyone in a family for four days before the solstice. On the day named as the solstice, the prayer sticks are planted-at least one by each person-in normal holes dug by the head of the household. Each prayer stick is named for an ancestor or deity.
Traditional prayer sticks are usually made out of cedar and are forked; Are equivalent to the measurement from the maker’s elbow to the tips of their fingers; and are taken from a tree that the maker feels connected to. Tobacco is offered to the largest tree of the same species in the area and permission is asked to take a part of its relative. The bark can be stripped. The bark can be carved on the stick. One feather should be added to the prayer stick; traditionally this is a wild turkey feather. A bit of tobacco is placed in a red cloth and tied onto one of the forks. Fur or bone from an animal that the maker wishes to honor is tied onto the stick. Metal or stones should not be tied to the stick. It is also customary to say prayers silently as one makes the prayer stick.
It is the time for the Holly King (the king of darkness) to do battle with the Oak King (king of lightness) once again. This happens twice every year. At the summer solstice (around June 21—the longest day and the shortest night) the days begin to shorten and the Holly King defeats the Oak King and reigns supreme in the dark times (or days getting shorter). But in December, following the winter solstice, the days begin to lengthen and the Oak King conquers the Holly King and reigns during the light times.
Wild Foods
To honor the Oak King, some of our ancestors would include acorn muffins, cakes, or breads in the evening feasts. (The process of making acorn flour is long, but rewarding.)
Fresh Greenery
Holly was the sacred plant of the Romans and their god Saturn. Holly was celebrated in by the week long Roman holiday of Saturnalia (which ended on December 23). The Romans made normal wreaths of holly and exchanged them as tokens of friendship.
Evergreen boughs (and trees), symbolizing the rebirth of nature and vegetation, were brought into the home; it was felt they had some special gift that they could remain green during the cold winter months.
Pine needles (check for edible varieties in your area) can be dried, and then crushed and added to teas, honeys, and breads for the evening, and the season.
Bonfires
Many traditions included a bonfire as an offering of light and fire and an appeal to the sun to warm the earth once again. Some traditions lead to contemplation of the past year, and throwing something into the fire that symbolized a habit one wanted to rid themselves of. (A modern version would be throwing in a cookie and asking to lose a few pounds!) One might throw something into the fire they would like to improve on during the upcoming year. (Now, perhaps you could throw in a single seed of plants you would like to grow or see flourish in 2017.)
Yule Logs
What we refer to now as the Yule log was traditionally a log made preferably of oak (for the Oak King), but ash, pine or birch were also acceptable. They were decorated with evergreen boughs, berries, or seeds. During the evening, the Yule log was burned. Believing the ashes were mystical, people spread them on fields, in the hopes of encouraging magical fertilization in the spring. A normal piece of the log was always saved and used to start the fire the following year.
It was the French who made the delightful confectionery version of the Yule log we know and cherish today!
In meteorology, winter in the Northern Hemisphere spans the entire period of December through February. The seasonal significance of the winter solstice is in the reversal of the gradual lengthening of nights and shortening of days. The earliest sunset and latest sunrise dates differ from winter solstice, however, and these depend on latitude, due to the variation in the solar day throughout the year caused by the Earth's elliptical orbit (see earliest and latest sunrise and sunset).
Worldwide, interpretation of the event has varied across cultures, but many have held a recognition of rebirth, involving holidays, festivals, gatherings, rituals or other celebrations around that time.
In astronomy, the winter solstice is the moment when the earth is at a point in its orbit where one hemisphere is most inclined away from the sun. This causes the sun to appear at its farthest below the celestial equator when viewed from earth. Solstice is a Latin borrowing and means "sun stand", referring to the appearance that the sun's noontime elevation change stops its progress, either northerly or southerly. The day of the winter solstice is the shortest day and the longest night of the year.
In the northern hemisphere, the winter solstice usually falls on December 21/December 22, which is the southern hemisphere's summer solstice. At this time, the sun appears over the Tropic of Capricorn, roughly 23.5 degrees South of the earth's equator. In the southern hemisphere, winter solstice falls on June 21/June 22, which is the northern hemisphere's summer solstice. At this time, the sun appears over the Tropic of Cancer.
Since the winter solstice, summer solstice, vernal equinox, and autumnal equinox were probably observed for the first time by people in the northern hemisphere, these naming conventions originally corresponded to the northern hemisphere's seasons. In most reckonings, the winter solstice is midwinter. In Ireland's calendar, the solstices and equinoxes all occur at about midpoint in each season. For example, winter begins on November 1, and ends on January 31.
No one is really sure how long ago humans recognized the winter solstice and began heralding it as a turning point -- the day that marks the return of the sun to the northern hemisphere.
Many cultures the world over perform solstice ceremonies. At their root -- an ancient fear that the failing light would never return unless humans intervened with anxious vigil or antic celebration. Most ancient cultures built Astronomical Observatories - tombs, temples, cairns among others, to align with the solstices and equinoxes.
The winter solstice was immensely important because the people were economically dependent on monitoring the progress of the seasons. Starvation was common during the first months of the winter, January to April (northern hemisphere) or July to October (southern hemisphere), also known as "the famine months". In temperate climates, the midwinter festival was the last feast celebration, before deep winter began.
Most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed during the winter, so it was almost the only time of year when a plentiful supply of fresh meat was available. The majority of wine and beer made during the year was finally fermented and ready for drinking at this time. The concentration of the observances were not always on the day commencing at midnight or at dawn, but at the beginning of the pagan day, which in many cultures fell on the previous eve.
Because the event was seen as the reversal of the Sun's ebbing presence in the sky, concepts of the birth or rebirth of sun gods have been common and, in cultures which used cyclic calendars based on the winter solstice, the "year as reborn" was celebrated with reference to life-death-rebirth deities or "new beginnings" such as Hogmanay's Redding, a New Year cleaning tradition. Also "reversal" is yet another frequent theme, as in Saturnalia's slave and master reversals.
There's much new scholarship about Neolithic peoples and their amazing culture. For example, it now looks as though writing is much more ancient than we earlier thought -- as much as 10,000 years old. Neolithic peoples were the first farmers. Their lives were intimately tied to the seasons and the cycle of harvest - which would mean that they were attuned to the movement of celestial objects and seasons. Scholars have not as yet found proof, though, that these peoples had the skill to pinpoint a celestial event like a solstice. Earliest markers of time, found from these ancient peoples are notches carved into bone that appear to count the cycles of the moon. But perhaps they watched the movement of the sun as well as the moon, and perhaps they celebrated it -- with fertility rites, with fire festivals, with offerings and prayers to their gods and goddesses. Many Native American Tribes, such as the Cherokee, would build offerings in the forests to the Sun God, for example, during Winter Solstice. Many of these gifts or offerings, were built out of rocks & stones and/or trees and branches.
So my question is, what if animals observe these events in some sort of ritualistic way as well? I have been conducting my own studies and mapping out when different Bigfoot structures or markings appear, how long they are present, and when they have been removed. I have noticed that structures are being built (including stick structures as well as rock structures) around the different seasonal events. For example a week to two weeks prior to the Winter Solstice, you will notice stick structures, and often rock structures are being erected. Could this be something that the Bigfoot creatures learned from their ancient Native American Friends? I have also started mapping out the alignment of these various structures to the different constellations in the sky. It is also worthy of mention that the animal species are affected by the different changes of seasons. For example, did you know that primates are more fertile and produce more sex hormones during the Winter Solstice? It was not uncommon for a primate to expand his home boundaries a great distance, as he mated with various females in the area during Winter Solstice.
Humans also experiences changes during these different seasonal events. Our ancient ancestors mapped out the constellations and held the change of seasons as sacred events, which are still celebrated by many cultures today.
Could these Bigfoot creatures actually be more intelligent than we give them credit for? I think so...by a long shot! I think every species of animal has far progressed beyond the caveman mentality....why would these creatures have not? Do they hold ancient secrets from our ancient ancestors relating to the sky, and the different changes of the seasons? Their behavioral patterns, according to my research, aligns with many ancient traditions and sacred structures built by our ancestors that we still see today.
Lets take a look at Primates, for example. You may well remember that in 2015, Chimps were observed conducting some sort of ritualistic behavior during the Spring Equinox. The media outlets, such as The New Scientist, Daily Mail in the U.K. and The Independent, ran with different theories about this observation, as outlined in the below text.
So my question is, what if animals observe these events in some sort of ritualistic way as well? I have been conducting my own studies and mapping out when different Bigfoot structures or markings appear, how long they are present, and when they have been removed. I have noticed that structures are being built (including stick structures as well as rock structures) around the different seasonal events. For example a week to two weeks prior to the Winter Solstice, you will notice stick structures, and often rock structures are being erected. Could this be something that the Bigfoot creatures learned from their ancient Native American Friends? I have also started mapping out the alignment of these various structures to the different constellations in the sky. It is also worthy of mention that the animal species are affected by the different changes of seasons. For example, did you know that primates are more fertile and produce more sex hormones during the Winter Solstice? It was not uncommon for a primate to expand his home boundaries a great distance, as he mated with various females in the area during Winter Solstice.
Humans also experiences changes during these different seasonal events. Our ancient ancestors mapped out the constellations and held the change of seasons as sacred events, which are still celebrated by many cultures today.
Could these Bigfoot creatures actually be more intelligent than we give them credit for? I think so...by a long shot! I think every species of animal has far progressed beyond the caveman mentality....why would these creatures have not? Do they hold ancient secrets from our ancient ancestors relating to the sky, and the different changes of the seasons? Their behavioral patterns, according to my research, aligns with many ancient traditions and sacred structures built by our ancestors that we still see today.
Lets take a look at Primates, for example. You may well remember that in 2015, Chimps were observed conducting some sort of ritualistic behavior during the Spring Equinox. The media outlets, such as The New Scientist, Daily Mail in the U.K. and The Independent, ran with different theories about this observation, as outlined in the below text.
Mysterious chimpanzee behavior could be 'sacred rituals'
Scientists baffled by footage of primates throwing rocks and 'building shrines at sacred tree' for no reason. The ritual has similarities with the building of shrines or cairns, a human ritual that has been happening for thousands of years and across civilizations.
The discovery defied explanation. A researcher studying chimpanzees in the Savannahs of the Republic of Guinea was baffled by a strangely scarred tree she had found.
Laura Kehoe, a PhD student at Humboldt University in Berlin, wondered whether it was the work of the chimps.
So she set up a remote camera and it showed that chimpanzees were indeed behind it. What she found gave her goosebumps: chimps were placing stones in the hollow of trees, and bashing trees with rocks.A group had approached the tree and behaved in a highly unusual way.
Some of them threw stones at the tree for no apparent reason, which explained the scars. Others gathered stones and laid them at the foot of the tree, creating a rough cairn. This was no idle play.
Sign or symbol?
The behavior could be a means of communication, since rocks make a loud bang when they hit hollow trees. Or it could be more symbolic.“Maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees,” Kehoe wrote on her blog.
Of course it’s not proof that chimps believe in any kind of god, as the Daily Mail would have it, but it is the latest evidence of their extraordinarily rich behavior.
In recent years we’ve seen chimps using spears to hunt bushbabies, going to war, and seemingly using doll-shaped sticks as toys.
I especially liked this last study, which found that juvenile wild chimps – more commonly females – played with sticks as children play with dolls, cradling them and even making nests for them to sleep in.
The footage shows chimpanzees engaging in bizarre behavior — which might be a form of sacred ritual that could show the beginnings of a kind of religious belief.
Chimpanzees in West Africa have been spotted banging and throwing rocks against trees and throwing them into gaps inside, leading to piles of rocks. Those rocks do not appear to be for any functional purpose — and might be an example of an early version of ritual behavior.
The discovery might help researchers learn more about the basis of human religion and rituals, and how such activities formed in our own history.
The scientist described seeing the behavior through cameras that were set up to watch the chimpanzees. They saw them assembling piles of stones — of a similar kind of the ritual cairns that have been found throughout human history.
Chimpanzees and other apes have long been known to use stones and other materials as tools, including their use as nutcrackers to get into food that is cased in a hard shell. But the new behavior doesn’t seem to have the same functional purpose.
“This represents the first record of repeated observations of individual chimpanzees exhibiting stone tool use for a purpose other than extractive foraging at what appear to be targeted trees,” the researchers write in their abstract.
“The ritualized behavioral display and collection of artifacts at particular locations observed in chimpanzee accumulative stone throwing may have implications for the inferences that can be drawn from archaeological stone assemblages and the origins of ritual sites.”
For humans, stone buildings and piles have symbolized a wide variety of things, which have seen them used in burials and shrines. Those examples are often among the earliest examples of religious behavior in human history, and so the chimpanzee behavior could represent a similar instinct.
The chimpanzee behavior could also represent a direct connection with human religious rituals. Indigenous West African people also collect stones at sacred trees — and similar behavior is seen elsewhere — in a way that looks “eerily similar to what we have discovered here”, one of the researchers wrote.
In a piece written around the findings, researcher Laura Kehoe described the experience of watching the chimp look around and then fling a rock at the tree trunk.
“Nothing like this had been seen before and it gave me goose bumps,” she wrote.
The discovery could offer insights into the way that humanity’s sacred rituals began, she wrote.
“Marking pathways and territories with signposts such as piles of rocks is an important step in human history,” wrote Ms Kehoe. “Figuring out where chimps' territories are in relation to rock throwing sites could give us insights into whether this is the case here.”
Rain dance
But most pertinent to the discovery of the “shrine trees”, we’ve seen evidence of chimps displaying strange ritual-like behaviour in the last few years. First, a “ritual” dance performed during rainfall. Then a peculiar slow-motion display in the face of a bush fire in Senegal.Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University, who observed the “fire dance” in 2006, said that the behavior seems to suggest that chimps have a conceptual understanding of fire. Perhaps they are paying respect to it, in some way. I’ve also heard stories of chimps performing dances in front of waterfalls.
Maybe chimps have some understanding of impressive natural phenomena such as rain storms, wild fires and waterfalls and are paying “respect” to them. So I always hoped that we’d find evidence of a “temple” in the forest.
Pruetz, who is involved in the new study, thinks the chimps bang stones to communicate. Many males drum on root buttresses as the noise carries further than the standard chimp cry, the pant-hoot, she says. But often there aren’t any trees with buttress roots, so perhaps they bang stones instead.
Bang if you can hear me
What about chimps storing stones in hollow trees, though?“It does seem to be a tradition found in some groups,” she says. “If that fits the definition of proto-ritualistic, I have no problem with it.”
“It’s such a cool observation,” says primate cognitive psychologist Laurie Santos of Yale University.
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MPI-EVA PanAf/Chimbo Foundation
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“In my monkey behavior experience, low noises often serve a communicative function – males trying to act dominant, etc. – so my instinct is that this behavior might work a lot like that,” she says.
Naturally, it’s way too soon to conclude that this is proto-religious behavior. For one thing, even pigeons have been described as showing “superstitious” behavior. “We’d need more observation – and perhaps actual experiments – to know if chimpanzees are using the behavior as anything like a ritual,” Santos says.
Incidentally, I used to think of stories like these as chipping away at the various claims to uniqueness that we erected to separate us from other animals. For example the creation of musical instruments by wild apes, evidence that chimps show empathy, and intimations of mortality in a range of animals.
I don’t see it quite like that anymore. It’s hard to argue that we’re not unique when asked if chimps could build their own LHC, as one primatologist once asked me.
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| MPI-EVA PanAf/Chimbo Foundation |
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/srep22219
Chimps may not stage operas, but they do have “culture”, says an international team of chimpanzee researchers. They have found 39 different behaviors, including courting rituals and foraging techniques, that seem to have been passed down in only some chimp societies.
Many behaviors are instinctive because they are programmed into the genes and do not need to be learned. Others are cultural and are passed on through some kind of observational learning or imitation. There have been scattered reports of such learning in a few species, such as a unique song shared by a bird community, but scientists are still divided on whether any animals have a broad enough repertoire of learned behaviors to constitute a culture.
Andrew Whiten, a baboon specialist at the University of St Andrews in Fife, hoped to shed some light on this. He got together with the directors of seven Chimp research stations, including Jane Goodall of the Gombe Stream Research Center in Tanzania. Together, they drew up a list of 65 separate activities that chimps had indulged in during a combined total of more than 150 years of observations.The most interesting thing turned out to be the behaviors that were absent in some groups. In some cases, there was a good ecological explanation. Chimps had not learned to crack open nuts, for instance, in regions where nuts are not available.
But often missing behaviors could not simply be explained away. In Mahale, Tanzania, for example, chimps in one group all fished for termites with leaves. But a second group in Mahale and one in Gombe, where both termites and leaves were plentiful, did not do this.
Only chimps from the Taï forest site in the Ivory Coast regularly poked sticks into hives to kill bees and flick them out. And only the Gombe chimps tickled themselves with twigs.
The team also found that four of the study populations did a ritual dance when rain began to fall, two others sometimes began to dance, while another group did nothing at all at the start of a downpour. Even ways of attracting attention varied. Three of the populations always snapped branches; one of these also knocked their knuckles loudly on trees, as did two other groups that hadn’t discovered the potential of branch-snapping.
In all, the researchers ended up with a list of 39 separate examples of behaviors that were present in some populations but inexplicably absent from others. “All these behaviors were passed on by observation,” Whiten concludes.
Frans De Waal, a primate researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, says chimps have an impressive record: “The evidence is overwhelming that chimpanzees have a remarkable ability to invent new customs and technologies, and they pass these on socially rather than genetically.”
Chimp’s dance suggests a mental grasp of fire & Other Ritualistic Behavior
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| Source: New Scientist |
Anthropologist Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University in Ames recounts that the male faced the fire with “a really exaggerated slow-motion display” before redirecting his display at chimps sheltering in a nearby baobab tree. Barking vocalizations from the male, never heard in more than 2000 hours of monitoring the group, were also heard.
Pruetz and co-author Thomas LaDuke at the East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania suggest that the chimps were cognizant enough to predict the fire’s movement, retreating short distances at a time while staying calm. Other animals, in contrast, panic when fire approaches.
“If chimps with their normal brain size can conceptually deal with fire, then maybe we should rethink some of the earliest evidence for fire usage,” Pruetz says. The earliest confirmed evidence of controlled fire use dates to several thousand years ago but some palaeoanthropologists argue control began as far back as 1 to 2 million years ago. The chimps’ responses to two fires – set for land clearance – were seen in 2006.
Primatologist William McGrew at the University of Cambridge is wary of granting chimps a “conceptualization of fire”, but further work could yield interesting results, he says.
In this clip, for example, the Chimps appear to be doing some sort of ritual to the Sun, similar to Native American Ritual dances and chants to the Sun during events such as the Winter Solstice.
Journal reference: American Journal of Physical Anthropology, DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21245
To unravel this distinction, and other mysteries of our closest living relatives, we must make space for them in the wild. In the Ivory Coast alone, chimpanzee populations have decreased by more than 90 percent in the last 17 years.
Are Wild Chimpanzees Building Shrines?
I trampled clumsily through the dense undergrowth, attempting in vain to go a full five minutes without getting snarled in the thorns that threatened my every move. It was my first field mission in the Savannahs of the Republic of Guinea. The aim was to record and understand a group of wild chimpanzees that 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.
We paused at a clearing in the bush. I let out a sigh of relief that no thorns appeared to be within reach, but why had we stopped? I made my way to the front of the group to ask the chief of the village and our legendary guide, Mamadou Alioh Bah. He told me he had found something interesting—a few markings on a tree trunk. Some in our group of six suggested that wild pigs had made these marks while scratching up against the tree trunk; others suggested it was teenagers messing around.
But Alioh had a hunch. This man can find a single fallen chimp hair on the forest floor, and he can spot chimps kilometers away with his naked eye better than I can with expensive binoculars. So when he has a hunch, you listen to that hunch. We set up a camera trap in the hope that whatever made these marks would come back and do it again, so we could catch it all on film.
Camera traps automatically start recording when any movement occurs in front of them. For this reason they are an ideal tool for recording animals doing their own thing without any disturbance. I made notes to return to the same spot in two weeks (as that’s roughly how long the batteries last) and we moved on, back into the wilderness.
Whenever you return to a camera trap there is always a sense of excitement in the air of the mysteries that it could hold. Most of our videos consist of branches swaying in strong winds or wandering farmers’ cows enthusiastically licking the camera lens, but still there is an uncontrollable anticipation that maybe something amazing has been captured.
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.
Nothing like this had been seen before and it gave me goose bumps. Jane Goodall first discovered wild chimps using tools in the 1960s. Chimps use twigs, leaves, sticks, and some groups even use spears in order to get food. Stones have also been used by chimps to crack open nuts and cut open large fruit. Occasionally, chimps throw rocks in displays of strength to establish their position in a community.
But what they discovered during their now-published study wasn’t a random, one-off event, it was a repeated activity with no clear link to gaining food or status. In other words, 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 while studying early human history.
Videos poured in. Other groups working on the project began searching for trees with telltale markings. We found the same mysterious behavior in normal 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.
I spent many months in the field, along with many other researchers, trying to figure out what these chimps are up to. So far we have two main theories. The behavior could be part of a male display, to which the loud bang made when a rock hits a hollow tree adds emphasis. This could be important in areas where there are not many trees with large roots on which chimps would normally drum their powerful hands and feet. Trees that produce an impressive bang could accompany or replace feet drumming, and thus become popular spots for revisits.
On the other hand, the behavior could be more symbolic—and more reminiscent of our own past. Marking pathways and territories with signposts such as piles of rocks is an important step in human history. Figuring out where chimps’ territories are in relation to rock throwing sites could give us insights into whether the same idea applies to them.
Even more intriguing than this, we may have found the first evidence of chimpanzees’ creating a kind of shrine or “sacred” trees. Indigenous West African people have stone collections at sacred trees and such man-made stone collections, commonly observed across the world, look eerily similar to what we have discovered here.To unravel this distinction, and other mysteries of our closest living relatives, we must make space for them in the wild. In the Ivory Coast alone, chimpanzee populations have decreased by more than 90 percent in the last 17 years.
A combination of increasing human populations, habitat destruction, poaching, and infectious disease now endangers chimpanzees. Leading scientists warn us that, if nothing changes, chimps and other great apes will have only 30 years left in the wild. In the unprotected forests of Guinea, where we first discovered this enigmatic behavior, rapid deforestation is rendering the area close to uninhabitable for the chimps that once thrived there. Allowing chimpanzees in the wild to continue spiraling toward extinction will not only be a critical loss to biodiversity, but a tragic loss to our own heritage, too.
You can support chimps with your time, by becoming a citizen scientist and helping spy on their behavior at www.chimpandsee.org, and with your wallet by donating to the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation. Who knows what we might find next that could forever change our understanding of our closest relatives. Now let's look at ape intelligence and other normal ape behaviors.
Incredible footage shows monkeys using saw to cut tree branches and hunt bush babies with handmade spears
The orangutans and chimps are caught on camera making tools, using soap and hunting like humans.
When it comes to using tools, our closest animal relatives are kings of the jungle. Incredible new footage reveals that monkeys are a dab hand at hunting and woodwork. Scientists used to think that only humans could make weapons for killing other mammals. But the footage shows our primate cousins sharpening sticks to create spears to use to hunt bush babies.
It also captures an orangutan using a saw to enthusiastically chop branches - with great precision.
The remarkable scenes were filmed for the BBC One series 'Spy in the Wild', which features 'spy-bots' - lifelike robots disguised as different animals.
In the footage, due to air tomorrow night, a troop of chimps in Senegal, Africa, are seen going on the hunt for dinner using spears.
It can take five years for a monkey to master this skill, says former Doctor Who star David Tennant, who narrates the program.
The chimps start by hunting termites. But soon, things turn more sinister as the monkeys go on the hunt for adorable bush babies.
The footage is captured using an ingenious bush baby 'spy' - a cuddly robot replica with a camera for eyes.
But it's the females of the troop that are the real pros.
They use well-crafted weapons, while the males tend to end up with weaker, more flexible branches.
Making a spear that is long and strong enough is a challenge, but our evolutionary cousins rise to the challenge.
One amusing clip shows a bemused male trying to spear his lunch before giving up and deciding to go for a nap.
Another clip reveals orangutans from Borneo, Asia, acting exactly like humans.
The amazing footage was captured using a 'spy-rock' and shows why scientists think monkeys are one of the brainiest species in the animal kingdom.
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In the clip, one female orangutan is seen using tree bark as soap by rubbing it all over her arms.
Astonishingly, the monkey finds a saw and begins cutting up branches despite being totally wild.
Her opposable thumbs come to good use as she saws at the wood.
She is being watched by 'Spy-Orangutan' - a robot monkey camera who decides to join in with its own saw.
She even clears away the sawdust as she hacks through the branch, using her feet like a vice to hold it still.
But the monkeys aren't used to hard work and are soon exhausted. Yawning, the female decides to call it a day.
Chimp nest architecture has lasting foundations
WHEN a chimpanzee builds a tree house, it goes for the lazy option: prefab. Although they make a new nest every night, chimps often build them on branches that have previously been shaped into the perfect foundation.
While animals like beavers and birds are famous for their nest-building, the great apes – including chimpanzees – are the only primates to build such structures. Chimps start by climbing high into the trees, often tens of meters above ground. There they bend and break branches to form a circular platform, which they top off with a soft mattress of twigs and leaves.
Fiona Stewart of the University of Cambridge and colleagues spent three years studying chimp nests in the Issa region of west Tanzania. Of 275 nest sites, a quarter were re-used within nine months of being built and nearly half within 18 months. The main bulk of the nests tend to decay within six months, so the chimps often returned long after the materials had rotted away (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.05.005).
Closer examination revealed that the chimps left scars at 79 per cent of sites: some branches were broken or ripped off, while others had been bent, forcing them to grow in a new direction. Branches were also often arranged in a horizontal triangle that acted as a nest support. In effect, the chimps left foundations in place to build on when they returned. This is further evidence that chimps can plan ahead, says Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University in Ames.
The findings may open a new avenue for studies into chimp archaeology, says Michael Haslam of the University of Oxford. Haslam studies the evolution of behaviour and culture and thinks archaeology has focused too much on the highly unusual human animal.
He is excavating stone tools used by Brazilian capuchin monkeys, and wonders if ancient trees may retain a record of evolving chimp architecture.
Apes' Simple Nests Are Feats of Engineering
When they are ready to snuggle up at the tops of trees, great apes make themselves cozy "nests" in which to rest for the night. New studies of these one-night nests reveal their incredible complexity.
"They are almost as complex as a man-made shelter you might make," study researcher A. Roland
Ennos of the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience. "They know how the wood is going to break, and they have a feel for how strong they have to make it [the nest]. That shows the apes have intelligence and have a feel for the physics of their environment."
These nests are about 4 to 5 feet long and about 3 feet wide (1.2 to 1.5 meters long, and slightly less
that 1 meter wide). The apes make them in the forest canopy, which can be between 30 and 60 feet (10 and 20 m) up, and it takes them only about 10 minutes to build. They use the nests only once, and then move on. The nests keep them warmer, away from insects and keep them safe, up off the forest floor.
Nests for napping
In the new study, published today (April 16) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers studied fresh nests left by wild orangutans in Indonesia. They studied the size, shape and composition of the nests, which are made in the crooks of large branches; living branches about an inch (3 centimeters) wide, are bent and interwoven to form the nest.
"They are just bent. They can actually stay living and later on you can go back to them and see they are like an archeological artifact of all these strangely bent items," Ennos said. "It's very similar to weaving a basket, they have to break the branches, weave them together and form a nice, strong, rigid structure." [Sleep Soundly: Images of Primate Nests]
They even use the Normalest branches to line the nest, building a mattress and pillow of sorts.
These complicated nests are a sort of tool for the apes. "In order to build these nests they must have some sort of picture and feel for the world and the strength of branches and how they behave," Ennos said. "People talk about man as the tool user and tool master, but the nest of the orangutan is really a complicated tool for sleeping."
Chimp nests
Other great apes make complex nests as well, including chimpanzees and bonobos. Another recent study, published March 28 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, analyzed the nest-building habits of West African chimpanzees.
The researchers saw the chimps built nests very similar to those of the orangutans, except sometimes the chimps chose to nest on the ground. To find out what caused the chimps to sleep on the ground versus way up in the trees, where it's seemingly safer from predators, the researchers gathered information about the areas where they found either ground or tree nests.
Chimpanzee nest-building habits could provide clues to what drove humans from the trees.
Researchers have suggested that perhaps a lack of trees in different habitats could have caused humans to nest on the ground. The new study didn't find evidence that ground-nesting chimpanzees do so because of a lack of trees. (Past research published in 2011 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology found that chimp nests in trees were better at keeping away insects and were also warmer than sleeping on the ground.)
"This suggests that our direct ancestors were neither the only, nor the first, species to come down from the trees," study researcher Katherlijne Koops, of the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. "This is intriguing as it has long been believed that coming down from the trees was a crucial evolutionary shift." Resource: Live Science
Ape Sounds:
When Do the Seasons of the Year Begin?
Listed below are the equinox and solstice dates and times, based on the Eastern Time Zone (ET). Adjust to your time zone. Note that an almanac is an astronomical “calendar of the heavens;” these dates are not based on local meteorology.
For readers of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, these dates mark the start of the spring, summer, autumn, and winter seasons in the Northern Hemisphere.
Note: The times are based on Eastern time. Subtract 3 hours for Pacific time, 2 hours for Mountain time, 1 hour for Central time, or whatever is relevant to your time zone. In the case of Summer Solstice 2017, the date will shift back to June 20 for some time zones.
| Seasons of 2017: | |
|---|---|
| SPRING EQUINOX | March 20, 6:29 A.M. EDT |
| SUMMER SOLSTICE | June 21, 12:24 A.M. EDT |
| FALL EQUINOX | September 22, 4:02 P.M. EDT |
| WINTER SOLSTICE | December 21, 11:28 A.M. EST |
| Seasons of 2018: | |
|---|---|
| SPRING EQUINOX | March 20, 12:15 P.M. EDT |
| SUMMER SOLSTICE | June 21, 6:07 A.M. EDT |
| FALL EQUINOX | September 22, 9:54 P.M. EDT |
| WINTER SOLSTICE | December 21, 5:23 P.M. EST |
Author: Angela Ashton, Founder
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