They are not likely to start barbecuing in the rainforest, but chimpanzees can understand the concept of cooking and are willing to postpone eating raw food, even carrying food some distance to cook it rather than eating immediately, scientists reported on Tuesday.
The findings, based on nine experiments conducted at the Tchimpounga Sanctuary in the Republic of the Congo and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that chimps have the brainpower needed to cook, including planning, causal understanding and ability to postpone gratification.
They lack the ability to produce fire, but if they were given a source of heat, chimps “might be quite able to manipulate [it] to cook,” said Harvard University developmental psychologist Felix Warneken, who conducted the study with Alexandra Rosati.
Photo: AFP
While the finding might seem esoteric, it lends support to the idea that cooking accelerated human evolution. Cooked food is easier to digest, spurring the growth of large brains in our australopithecine ancestors, Harvard University’s Richard Wrangham said about a decade ago.
If chimps have the cognitive skills to cook, australopithecines likely did, too, said Wrangham, who was not involved in the study.
“It suggests that with a little extra brainpower, australopithecines could indeed have found a way to use fire to cook food,” he said.
Archaeological evidence suggests humans began using fire 1 million years ago.
In one experiment, scientists presented chimps with two containers. One yielded cooked food through a false bottom — not actually cooking — and one did not.
The chimps learned that one transforms potatoes from raw to cooked. Given a choice of which device to put food in, they almost always opted for the “cooker,” showing understanding and willingly waiting for the food transformation.
Chimps did not put pieces of wood that scientists gave them into the cooker, suggesting they grasped that only food can be cooked.
Chimps usually eat food immediately, but were often willing to walk across a room to cook.
When the first one did this, the scientists wondered if they had a single “chimpanzee genius,” Warneken said.
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