Do Any Other Animals Cook Their Food

Kanzi the bonobo (a species closely related to chimps) holds a pan of vegetables he cooked at the Bully Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, November 2011. Kanzi was taught to melt. However, a new study is the get-go to evidence that animals tin larn a cooking-like skill on their ain. Laurentiu Garofeanu/Barcroft Media /Landov hide caption

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Laurentiu Garofeanu/Barcroft Media /Landov

Kanzi the bonobo (a species closely related to chimps) holds a pan of vegetables he cooked at the Peachy Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, Nov 2011. Kanzi was taught to cook. However, a new report is the starting time to testify that animals can acquire a cooking-similar skill on their own.

Laurentiu Garofeanu/Barcroft Media /Landov

If you requite a chimp an oven, he or she volition learn to cook.

That'south what scientists concluded from a report that could aid explain how and when early humans first began cooking their food.

"This suggests that as soon as fire was controlled, cooking could have ramped upward," says Alexandra Rosati, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and a co-author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the Regal Society B.

Evidence suggests early humans learned to command burn down between 400,000 and two million years ago.

Rosati and Felix Warneken, a psychologist at Harvard Academy, carried out the study at a chimpanzee sanctuary in the Democratic Congo-brazzaville. Offset, the researchers gave the chimps a device that appeared to work similar an oven.

Before he ate them, Kanzi cooked the vegetables in a pan on his ain. Laurentiu Garofeanu/Barcroft Media /Landov hibernate caption

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Laurentiu Garofeanu/Barcroft Media /Landov

Earlier he ate them, Kanzi cooked the vegetables in a pan on his own.

Laurentiu Garofeanu/Barcroft Media /Landov

"Yous can retrieve of it every bit a chimpanzee microwave where, basically, if the chimpanzees placed raw food in the device and so we shook the device, [the food] came out cooked," says Rosati, who will be moving from Yale to Harvard this summer.

The device was actually just a bowl with a false bottom that held cooked food. The researchers didn't use fire because it could have injured the chimps, and because some chimps might accept already seen how humans used it to cook food.

Afterward providing the "oven," Rosati and Warneken gave the chimps slices of uncooked white sweetness potato. "At first, the chimps pretty much ate the food. But then you almost could see them take this insight similar, Oh, my goodness, I can put it in this device and it comes back cooked," Rosati says.

Nearly half the chimps became regular users of the faux oven, Rosati says. And those chimps pretty much ignored a second device that returned their food uncooked.

Other experiments showed that chimps understood the concept of cooking.

When researchers gave them a cooked potato slice, they simply ate information technology. Merely when they got a raw carrot, they immediately put information technology in the device. And their preference for cooked food was so strong that they would concur on to raw potatoes, or carry them to other locations, in order to have them cooked.

Previously, chimps and their close cousins, bonobos (like Kanzi, who is pictured above), take been taught to cook by people. Just this is the first study showing that animals tin can larn a cooking-like skill on their own.

The results add to a debate about whether early humans had the encephalon power to effigy out cooking, an activity that requires planning, a willingness to delay gratification and sophisticated use of a tool, Rosati says.

The new study was inspired by the piece of work of a colleague at Harvard, Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology. His book Communicable Burn: How Cooking Made Us Man argues that early humans began cooking nearly immediately after learning to command fire, something Wrangham believes happened about 2 one thousand thousand years ago.

The new study suggests that even back then, our ancestors had brains that were prepare to barbecue, Wrangham says. "All they needed, I think, would be to run into a piece of nutrient drop in the fire, choice it out and realize that information technology tasted good, and and so the cultural transmission of that behavior would spread very speedily," Wrangham says.

The study too offers a reminder that very few behaviors are uniquely human, Wrangham says. "What we're seeing hither is that the chimps are surprisingly like to humans, even though the whole process of cooking seems like something that is a huge divide between humans and other animals."

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/03/411748170/chimps-are-no-chumps-give-them-an-oven-theyll-learn-to-cook

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