Chimpanzees have key cognitive abilities for cooking food — a hint that humans might have developed the capacity for cooking early in evolution.
Felix Warneken at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Alexandra Rosati at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, studied the cognition of chimps (pictured) by presenting them with a specially designed cooking device and raw and cooked foods such as carrots and potatoes. They confirmed that the apes prefer cooked to raw items, and found that chimps are willing to wait longer for cooked food than for raw food. The animals were able to give up their own raw food to cook it, and to save it for later cooking.
The results suggest that the last common ancestor of apes and humans had the cognitive abilities to cook food, long before humans learned to control fire.
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Chimps' mental capacity to cook. Nature 522, 131 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/522131e
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/522131e
