This week, the Professor of Ignorance John Lloyd and his curator Humphrey Ker welcome the crowd-sourcing rock star Amanda Palmer, evolutionary anthropologist Professor Volker Sommer and occult comedian Andrew O'Neill to discuss steam punk, cross-dressing, rock, sex, death, religion, humans and other great apes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03c2zwbIn this programme, Professor Sommer leaves some chimp dung in the museum. Why?
Because chimp dung from different parts of Africa is different! It seems some chimps specialise in eating ants - not termites with their diets, others in other areas eat termites - not ants. He ate ants to work out how many ants the chimps were eating.
He then asked, are there other primates that do and do not eat certain foods on regional bases? Yup, humans!
He proposes that chimps have religion! They use symbolic acts like eating something and not eating something else to mark who is a member of the group and who is not.
Makes sense to me of the various bans on pork, shellfish, cows etc that us primates have! Circumcision is another way to mark who belongs.