The ability to cook food is one of the most basic human traits, but it requires complex mental capabilities.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B learned chimpanzees have most of the mental capacity needed to cook food. The new discovery indicates the ability to cook food was closely tied to learning how to control fire.
"There are some ethical issues with providing the chimpanzees access to actual fire - given the danger," study co-author Alexandra Rosati, of Yale University's Department of Psychology, told Discovery News. "There is some evidence that Neanderthals may have cooked some food."
Rather than tasking the chimpanzees with preparing a meal, study co-author Felix Warneken, of Harvard University, had the animals taste cooked food versus raw food. He also tested the chimps to see if they would rather wait for their food to cook instead of eating the same thing raw.
"Trust is another component for cooking to become a practice in a social group," Warneken told BBC News. "This is required in addition to the individual psychological capacities that we targeted in our experiments."
Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard's Center for the Environment who was not affiliated with the study, told Discovery News he thinks the new discovery could even change paleontology to a certain degree.
"I am as impressed at the authors' ingenuity in devising these experiments and carrying them out so convincingly as I am at the results," he said. "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."
