The story of Jane Goodall's observations got me to thinking about my own addictive behavior in choosing hiking destinations with waterfalls, or views of rapids, there being some kind of unconscious compulsion to repeat the experience of being near rushing water. Being a native of the coastal region, I didn't really develop this until my 30s but it has been a factor ever since. Not that I have devoted a moment's conscious thought to preferring trails involving waterfalls, or self-talk about "waterfalls are beautiful" -- it's WAY more primitive and elemental than that. There is just a certain feeling, emotional but very visceral, aroused by the very thought of hiking to a waterfall or major rapids, a kind of vicarious sense of being swept along by the power and the beauty. Even just hearing that a newly opened trail has a waterfall on it evokes a thrill. Being in a kayak in whitewater makes this an actual physical experience instead of a vicarious one, but it's also very primitive and pre-linguistic-- "oh wow" is about as complicated as my thought process ever gets in such settings.
So multiply me by hundreds of other men and women up and down the Blue Ridge, or hundreds of thousands of people in other mountain regions around the world, hiking to gawk at waterfalls every weekend to say "oh, wow." It's not church, there's no Bible or hymnal, but at some deep level humans are responding to the same urges those Gombe chimps are at their waterfall. Is it religious? Proto-religious? There is a definite sense of pilgrimage to a sacred place, and in light of the Schaefer and de Waal theories, it is easy enough to envision some kind of continuity between human and animal behavior in such settings.
So your suggestion that the chimps were "awed" by a sense of the power, as well as the beauty, of the waterfall appeals to me a lot.
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