A History of Apes and Their Beliefs

Homo sapiens have so many present concerns that they easily overlook their past history and beliefs in meeting the challenges of the present era. This book considers the known facts about the ancient apes and their descendants that begins with a fossil record that is about 23 million years old. The apes have since evolved into an impressive family of animals. Apes have been classified into the following branches of a family tree: Homo sapiens (humans), chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orang-utangs. Only the first named branch of the tree has truly understandable speech of any complexity. All of these apes have some minimal ability to communicate to others by gestures and shouts of alerts of dangers and threats to safety, but only the Homo sapiens have more highly developed communication skills and lifestyle. Of the chimpanzees, it has been said that they are incredibly like humans. They have a dark side and are capable of violent brutality, even war. Homo sapiens have many similarities to the chimps, but they have developed very impressive and advanced capabilities since they abandoned a hunter-gather lifestyle thousands of years ago and became farmers of their food. Over thousands of years, their lifestyle has given them a settled life and changes in their bodies and thinking about their world. Homo sapiens have been able to outwit their competitors and predators. Slightly more than two thousand years ago, this unique branch of the ape tree, developed a belief that there must be a supreme deity along with evil demons overseeing the Earth and them. They devised a new and universal church to render specialized worship of that deity, protect them from demons, and guide them to conform their conduct to certain norms in order to merit a wonderful after death life with that deity. For hundreds of years afterward humans who publically expressed doubt about that deity or its church were tied to a pole and burned to death at the request of the dominate humans. That punishment no longer often happens in much of the world that has been divorced from clerical influence. Many still wish for the application of their religious beliefs to all civillian life. Discovery of artifacts, primate fossils, genetic studies and exploration of the Earth and the universe beyond has given Homo sapiens a modern understanding and belief about their past and future.