Moreover, it was not until 1960, when Jane Goodall made her historic journey to Gombe, Tanzania, that human beings acquired any real knowledge about the higher apes, specifically the chimpanzee, our closest evolutionary relative. Human beings split from a common ancestry with chimpanzees some six to eight million years ago. Through Goodall's research, however, we have learned that chimpanzees also make and use tools, and through the work of Roger Fouts and others, it has been demonstrated that chimpanzees and other higher apes can learn American Sign Language, that they have developed a working vocabulary of hundreds of words, that they can communicate their thoughts and emotions to us, and even that they can, on their own accord, teach this language to their young. Human beings are immensely complex beings, with both a penchant for both violence and compassion, egoism and altruism, but they have overstated their uniqueness and separated themselves from the community of life on the earth, both conceptually and existentially. This is our main failing, and the central reason behind the environmental and spiritual crisis human beings currently confront.
Human beings differentiate themselves from other groups in order to gain their identity.
Thus, there is a desperate need for a new consciousness, for new cosmopolitan identities, in the broadest and most literal sense of the term. Human beings must begin seeing themselves not as citizens of one nation or another, but of the earth, indeed, of the cosmos itself. Accordingly, human identity can only be properly perceived in the context of cosmology and new ecological stories. The old geocentric and anthropocentric stories are false, limited, dysfunctional, and dangerous, wholly unsuited for the destructive power of a technologically advanced civilization. Homocentric dramas need to be superseded by cosmological narratives that situate human life in the larger evolution of the universe.