From Article:

Every human culture has believed in spirits, gods or some other divine being. That's why human beings have often been called Homo religioso. Some people take this long history of belief in the otherworldly as evidence for God; doesn't it explain why religion continues to be so pervasive? But many scientists are coming up with their own, decidedly secular, theories about the origins of faith. In fact, over the last few years, a small cottage industry made up of scientists and philosophers has devoted itself to demystifying the divine.

Take Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who has proposed that religion is a meme -- an idea that evolved like a virus -- that infected our ancestors and continued to spread throughout cultures. By contrast, anthropologist Pascal Boyer argues that religious belief is a quirky byproduct of a brain that evolved to detect predators and other survival needs. In this view, the brain developed a hair-trigger detection system to believe the world is full of "agents" that affect our lives. And British biologist Lewis Wolpert, with yet another theory, posits that religion developed once hominids understood cause and effect, which allowed them to make complex tools. Once they started to make causal connections, they felt compelled to explain life's mysteries. Their brains, in essence, turned into "belief engines."

Of course, these thinkers are either religious skeptics or outright atheists who mean to imply that we've been duped by evolution to believe in supernatural beings when none, in fact, exist. That's what makes Barbara J. King, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, so unique. She has no desire to undermine religion. In fact, she's been deeply influenced by the religious writers Karen Armstrong and Martin Buber. But her main insights about the origins of religion come not from researching humans' deep history, but from observing very much alive non-human primates.

For the last two decades, King has studied ape and monkey behavior in Gabon and Kenya, and at the Smithsonian's National Zoo. In her new book, "Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion," King argues that religion is rooted in our social and emotional connections with each other. What's more, we can trace back the origins of our religious impulse not just to early cave paintings and burial sites 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, but much earlier -- back to our ancient ancestors millions of years ago. And today, King says, we can see the foundations of religious behavior in chimpanzees and gorillas; watching our distant cousins can do much to explain the foundations of our own beliefs.

Here's a link to an interview with Barbara J. King:
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/01/31/king/

I like this description alot:
I'm not suggesting that apes are religious. In fact, I have to say that, because Jane Goodall, who is such a renowned and loved figure for her chimpanzee studies, has said very provocatively that chimpanzees may have an incipient sense of religious awe. For example, when she comes upon them looking at a waterfall -- something in nature that is amazing -- they're riveted. She's wondering what's going through their minds and if they may be spiritual in some sense. That's a fascinating idea, but that's not my approach. I don't look for things in apes that are religious. I look at how their behavior relates to the very foundation of what later became religion. For me, the question turns on how I understand religion. I want to be very careful to differentiate between what we think about religion today and how it evolved. I'm really talking about the earliest origins of religion, which was a social and emotional process.

Good find.

I agree it is a fascinating idea. The thought that another creature can feel/sense something thats spiritual. How long will it take though to go from senseing something to seeking it and then believing it and then to worshiping it? Could be a long long research project. The problem is we will never really know what the apes are thinking right now, we have no way to communicate or to understand things from their perspective. By the time we are able to communicate with them sufficiently the thoughts of now will be distant tales of past.

You don't think the chimps are just hopeing the waterfall is gonna stop cos its making them feel like weeing, do ya?

I find it interesting that even among primates loneliness is thwarted by use of the imagination. This act can be extrapolated to awe aswell, where as imagination can verywell offer epoxy type answers to things not understood.

It is a large chasm to span, but to add language developement to these characteristics then imagination can then be communicated to others and what we have then is a developement of lore.

I believe that Barbara J. King may very well be onto something here: