Prefer cooked to raw food.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Researchers have discovered chimpanzees, which are the closest living relatives to humans, have all the mental skills needed to cook food apart from knowing how to harness fire.
In a series of experiments in the Republic of Congo, chimps in an animal sanctuary showed they preferred eating cooked vegetables to raw food, were willing to wait for food to be heated and knew what could and couldn’t be cooked.
Trials indicated they also understood the entire concept of cooking. The tests involved using a pretend “oven” – a plastic tub which the animals could use to swap raw treats for heated ones, according to Independent Online of New Zealand.
Despite the inclination to immediately scarf down any food they were handed, many of the 21 chimps in the study opted to wait and “cook” their food in the tub, the Royal Society journal Proceedings B reported.
Reuters noted that the chimps did not put pieces of wood that scientists gave them into the faux-oven, suggesting they grasped that only food can be cooked.
Primatologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University’s Center for the Environment, told Discovery News: “I am as impressed at the authors’ ingenuity in devising these experiments and carrying them out so convincingly as I am at the results.”
“I hope that this study continues to encourage archaeologists to find new ways to test the prediction that I favor, which is that hominins (early humans) began using fire around 2 million years ago or earlier, well before the current earliest strong evidence at 1 million years ago,” he added.