Chimps Possess Mental Skills To Cook, Study Reveals

Chimps can understand the concept of cooking and are willing to postpone eating raw food, a new study has found. They can even prefer carrying the food to some distance to cook it rather than eat immediately.

The study consists nine experiments conducted at the Tchimpounga Sanctuary in Republic of Congo. It suggested that chimps have all the brainpower needed to cook, including planning, causal understanding, and ability to postpone gratification.

However, they have no clue to produce fire. But if they were given a source of heat, chimps "might be quite able to manipulate (it) to cook," said developmental psychologist Felix Warneken of Harvard University, who conducted the study with Alexandra Rosati.

"It is an important question when cooking emerged in human evolution," Warneken said. "We thought one way to get at this question is to investigate whether chimpanzees, in principle, have the critical cognitive capacities for cooking. If our closest evolutionary relative possesses these skills, it suggests that once early humans were able to use and control fire they could also use it for cooking."

 "It suggests that with a little extra brainpower, australopithecines could indeed have found a way to use fire to cook food," said Harvard's Richard Wrangham, who was not involved in the study.

According to archaeological evidences, humans began using fire one million years ago.

The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.