London - They have already shown that they enjoy tea parties. So it should come as no surprise that chimps are also intelligent enough to understand cooking.
Researchers have found that our closest relatives have all the mental skills needed to cook food – apart from knowing how to control fire. In a series of experiments, chimps in an African animal sanctuary showed they preferred eating cooked vegetables to raw, were willing to wait for food to be heated and knew what could and couldn’t be cooked.
Further trials showed 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.
Despite the temptation to simply gulp down any food they were given, many of the 21 chimps opted to wait and “cook” their food with the tub, the Royal Society journal Proceedings B reports.
“When one chimp did it, we thought maybe this one is a genius,” said researcher Alexandra Rosati from Yale University, “But eventually about half of them did it.”
As well as making food tastier, the heating process can also make it easier to digest – an insight often believed to be limited to humans. But the results suggest that many of the mental skills needed to cook emerged early in human evolution – before our ancestors split from chimps.
Dr Rosati added that the desire to cook food could therefore have been the driving force behind learning to control fire.
Daily Mail