If you give a chimp an oven, he or she will learn to cook.
That’s what scientists concluded from a study that could help explain how and when early humans first began cooking their food.
“This suggests that as soon as fire was controlled, cooking could have ramped up,” says Alexandra Rosati, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and a co-author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Evidence suggests early humans learned to control fire between 400,000 and 2 million years ago.
Rosati and Felix Warneken, a psychologist at Harvard University, carried out the study at a chimpanzee sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. First, the researchers gave the chimps a device that appeared to work like an oven. [continue]