[kijin]

A pillow doesn't need to be a factory-made product that you buy at a store. Plenty of humans make pillows out of natural objects when sleeping outdoors. I can totally imagine a mountain gorilla using a chunk of wood, or even a body part of another gorilla, as a "pillow" if it makes them feel more comfortable.

[navane]

My dog loves pillows. But he doesn't move them. If he's laying down, and a pillow-like object is near, he'll use it. But if the sun moves, he'll move, without the pillow.

[bee_rider]

Humans are environment-changers. That’s why dogs teamed up with humans. Humans seem to spend a lot of time doing strange and seemingly useless things, like banging rocks together and looking at shiny boxes, but at the end of the day there is always extra food and the environment around humans is full of mysteriously comfortable objects.

[slow_typist]

If our dog wants to rest and a fleece or wool blanket happens to be in reach, it will pull it in position (and sometimes even fold it) in order to rest its snout on it. But admittedly it does not move the blanket substantially. I have yet to understand how it decides where to rest though. There is a lot of places and none seems to really dominate the other ones.

[navane]

I have been paying more attention and ours loves head rests. So maybe they don't understand how to make or move them, he definitely prefers them. Disputing the original claim, or dogs differ too much from primates.

[yencabulator]

For what it's worth, my dog does carry big fluffy toys around, often putting her chin on them.

[ErigmolCt]

In order to protect skin on your face from acne or wrinkles I think it preferable to sleep on a pillow

[malfist]

I don't think gorillas are too worried about acne or wrinkles.

[helboi4]

Yeah im sure there are many tribespeople with pillows. It feels wierdly racist that this guy is acting like people in societies like this just live instinctually like gorillas and don't actually have the universal human trait of creating and relying on manmade tools.

[throwway120385]

The thing that makes it not racist for me is that he's clearly trying to point out that, as primates, in non-Western surroundings and when not socialized to prefer soft beds with fluffy pillows we tend to adopt similar sleeping positions as other primates do. It would be very racist if he had adopted a sneering "look at the lowly primitives" tone, but he's trying to show that these sleeping positions have helped him immensely and he's suggesting that we might research sleep positioning more as there seem to be differences in the two populations under comparison.

You can look at the COVID pandemic for an example of how body positioning has helped change how well people can breathe. Proning of severely sick patients substantially improved outcomes. That's literally just rolling the patient from their back to their stomach. So there might be something interesting there that we can learn if we pay attention. And he's trying to say "we can learn something from these people if only we pay attention."

[chillingeffect]

He's viewing humans and gorillas as primates, not viewing tribespeople as gorillas.

Tribes people don't live instinctually. They have culture, like us. The critique here is our culture could benefit from observing how their culture does it.