WASHINGTON: Chimpanzees have the cognitive abilities required for cooking, which were believed to be limited to humans, and the primates even choose to hoard raw vegetables if they know they will have the chance to ‘cook’ them later on, according to a new research.
Scientists found that chimpanzees prefer the taste of cooked food, can defer gratification while waiting for it and choose to hoard raw vegetables if they know they will have the chance to eat cooked vegetables later on.
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The transition to cooked food is widely viewed as an important evolutionary milestone because it would have allowed our primitive forebears to expand their diet and extract far more calories, reducing the amount of time required for foraging and chewing.
While various animals have been shown to have a preference for cooked vegetables and meats, which are softer and easier to digest, the intellectual abilities required to make the leap to preparing cooked food had been thought to be limited to humans. “What’s particularly interesting about cooking is it’s something we all do, but it involves a number of capacities that, even without the context of cooking, are thought to be uniquely human,” said Felix Warneken, a psychologist at Harvard University and co-author of the study.
