Chimpanzees and Crystals.

There is archaeological evidence that people have been into crystals for hundreds of thousands of years. So some researchers gave crystals to chimpanzees and discovered that they love them too. 

NY Times:

For the first experiment, the researchers used two pedestals that were installed in the chimps’ yards. On one, they placed a multifaceted quartz crystal that stood about a foot tall, and on the other, a sandstone rock of similar dimensions. (Dr. García-Ruiz named this experiment “The Monolith.”)

The chimps went crystal cuckoo. In one yard, they repeatedly approached the monolith until the alpha female, Manuela, wrenched it off its pedestal. After that, the crystal rarely left the troop’s sight, while they largely ignored the sandstone rock. One video shows a 50-year-old male chimp named Yvan carrying it while he climbs and eats cabbage, passing it between his hands and feet with great panache.

In the other yard, the experiment was cut short after a chimpanzee named Sandy immediately grabbed both items from their pedestals and brought them into the dormitories, where human caretakers don’t generally go. . . .

For the second experiment, researchers set out piles of pebbles in the gardens, with a few small crystals incorporated into each. The chimpanzees immediately sorted the crystals out of the piles.

Then they carried them in their mouths, turned them in the light and held them up to their eyes like old-timey prospectors.

Xeroxed and then Scanned Photo of a Cache of Crystals

I find this completely unsurprising. The human attraction to bright, shiny rocks, especially when they have interesting geometries, seems very primal to me, something so old as to defy any assignment of "meaning." Archaeologists are used to finding caches of crystals in all sorts of places; the one in the photo above was found buried next to the foundation of a house on the Manassas battlefield, probably built around 1870. The occuants were free African Americans, and an interest in in crystals seems to be a habit their ancestors brought from Africa. But they were far from the only ones to have such interests; I know of a cache of crystals hidden in the coffin of a wealthy white woman buried around 1920. Notice the stone point that was included in the collection above; this is also a common habit around the world, and many folks have been interested in the stone tools shaped by their distant ancestors.

We love bright, shiny, interestingly shaped things, and always have.