Perhaps stone-throwing, the researchers say, originated as a male display. Males who do it vocalize and appear quite aroused, though an adult female and a juvenile also were observed to throw the stones, so the behavior appears to have caught on more widely. Alternatively, might the stone caches amount to symbolic marking of trees they consider to be sacred, in a way analogous to the cairn-building carried out by people living in the region?

Or couldn’t the apes, I have wondered, simply enjoy the sensations associated with forceful or aimed throwing, just the way we may delight in skipping stones across a lake? The key thing to notice, in any case, is that the researchers never used the word “spirituality” in the Scientific Reports paper, noting only that the chimpanzees’ stone accumulations are “superficially similar” to the human examples at “sacred” trees.

Weeks later, in a post from The Conversation reprinted online in Slate and Scientific American, Laura Kehoe, one of the 80 Scientific Reports paper co-authors, took an extra speculative step: “Maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees.” Within days, the media soared into hyper-drive. Earth and Sky asked “Mysterious chimp behavior evidence of sacred rituals?” New Scientist’s headline “What do chimp ‘temples’ tell us about the evolution of religion?” is less skeptical, though the article itself adopts a more cautious tone. Caution was not a feature of tabloid newspapers’ accounts: The Mirror and the Daily Mail both featured headlines asking if proof is now here that chimpanzees believe in God.

Biological anthropologist and long-time chimpanzee field researcher Craig Stanford of USC dismisses all this hoopla flat out. “Ritualized behavior is common in the animal world,” he told me, “and chimpanzees throw stones in many contexts. The idea that this is proto-religious and the trees are somehow sacred sites is simply silly.”

The chasm between apes’ repeated throwing of stones taken from a cache at a tree, and apes’ creating the sacred through repeated action, is immense, and for Stanford, not navigable by science. Apes, as I have noted in my book Evolving God, do engage in certain acts of the imagination, including pulling an imaginary toy on an imaginary string (in captivity), and caring for a log apparently envisioned as a companion (in the wild). I’ve used instances like this, in addition to evidence for things like ape empathy and rule-following, to argue that the very deepest roots of human religiosity can be found in our primate cousins. But that’s a far cry from anointing them with a spiritual sensibility.

Feeling awe and wonder at nature is one thing—I’m really not about to disagree with Jane Goodall on this particular point—but linking those feelings necessarily with spirituality is another. (When I have watched baboons in Kenya, bison in Yellowstone National Park, and assorted wild visitors in my Virginia backyard, I have felt wonder. I haven’t felt spiritual.)