Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Humans are not along in recognizing that benefits of cooking some types of food, according to new research appearing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B which has found that chimpanzees also possess the cognitive capacity to do so.
In the study, Dr. Felix Warneken, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Harvard University Department of Psychology, and Alexandra Rosati, a post-doctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at Yale University, explored whether or not chimps could understand the core concepts associated with the cooking of food.
The researchers conducted a series of experiments which revealed that chimps not only had a preference for cooked food, but also the ability to understand the transformation of raw food to cooked food, the ability to discern between which objects should and should not be cooked, and the ability to save and transport food over great distances in order to cook it later (like going to the grocery store).
These findings suggest that these abilities likely emerged early on in human evolution, and that with the exception of the ability to control fire, chimps could possess all of the cognitive talents required to complete the processes associated with cooking. Since the types of creatures closest to humans appear to possess these skills, it suggests that these abilities developed shortly after early humans gained control over fire, the authors explained.
Kiss the cook! Unless of course it’s a chimp
Warneken and Rosati conducted their experiments at the Jane Goodall Institute’s Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Republic of Congo over the summer of 2011, in which they tested if chimps born in the while were able to make the mental connections required for cooking. First, they established that the creatures preferred cooked food by showing that they were willing to wait for a sweet potato to be cooked instead of immediately eating it raw.
In the tests that followed, the researchers presented chimps with both a “cooking device” that turned raw food into cooked slices, and a control device that left it the same to see if they were able to fully understand the process of transforming cooked food to raw. After witnessing a raw sweet potato go into both devices, but being able to choose only one before seeing its contents, nearly all of the chimps regularly picked the device that contained the cooked food.
Another experiment challenged the creatures to take the sweet potato and actively put it into the “cooking device” rather than keep and eat it raw. Unexpectedly, nearly half of the chimpanzees were willing to forgo the immediate reward and place a raw piece of potato in the device so that they would receive a cooked piece of food in return.
Warneken and Rosati told redOrbit via email that they were surprised that the chimpanzees were “willing to give up possession of their own food in order to place it in the cooking device. Although they could eat the raw food we gave them – which is what they would usually do when given food–many of them were able to inhibit this and give it up to be cooked.”
“In addition, they were able to transport it from one feeding location to the ‘cooking station,’” they added. “This was a tough problem, as the chimpanzees would often carry the raw food between their lips, and would sometimes (accidentally) eat it on the way. Nonetheless, they were successful at a high rate. A few chimpanzees were even able to save food… when they could anticipate that we would show up with the cooking device several minutes later.”
Fire control only thing preventing chimps from cooking
Additional research revealed that the chimps understood the cooking process well enough to understand that it could transform a food that had not been previously associated with the “cooking device” (in this case, carrots) with the same type of transformation, proving that they could generalize the process.
However, they were also smart enough to realize that not everything could be cooked. In another trial, the chimps were given both a piece of raw potato and a small piece of wood, and they only placed the potato in the cooker. This indicates that the chimps realize that only edible objects can be cooked, and that they won’t put random objects in the device hoping for a reward.
Two additional experiments showed that the chimps were willing to plan for the future by taking a food item and transporting it for the opportunity to cook it, and that they would wait for several minutes for the cooking device to show up rather than grow impatient and eat the raw food. The tests essentially revealed that the only thing preventing chimps from cooking is their inability to control fire. Could they someday gain that ability? Probably not, the authors said.
“Given what we know about how chimpanzees behave in their natural environment in the wild, it seems unlikely that chimpanzees will figure out how to control fire, something that even in humans required much social learning,” Warneken and Rosati told redOrbit. “However, our research suggests that they do have the capacity to understand the potential benefits of fire.”
“While these studies were focused on the evolution of cooking, our studies also show that chimpanzees show insightful responses to novel problems they have never faced before,” the researchers added. “These studies therefore build on a rich set of evidence that chimpanzees are sophisticated creatures that can think about the world in complex ways.”
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