Posted on 06/03/2015 12:54:06 PM PDT by Red Badger
They're not likely to start barbecuing in the rainforest, but chimpanzees can understand the concept of cooking and are willing to postpone eating raw food, even carrying food some distance to cook it rather than eat immediately, scientists reported on Tuesday.
The findings, based on nine experiments conducted at the Tchimpounga Sanctuary in Republic of Congo and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that chimps have all the brainpower needed to cook, including planning, causal understanding, and ability to postpone gratification.
They do lack the ability to produce fire. But if they were given a source of heat, chimps "might be quite able to manipulate (it) to cook," said developmental psychologist Felix Warneken of Harvard University, who conducted the study with Alexandra Rosati.
[...]
If chimps have the cognitive skills to cook, australopithecines likely did, too, said Wrangham, who was not involved in the study: "It suggests that with a little extra brainpower, australopithecines could indeed have found a way to use fire to cook food."
[...]
Some of the experiments confirmed studies by other scientists, such as that chimps prefer seared sweet potatoes to raw. But those tests did not test whether chimps have the mental chops to cook.
Other tests did. For instance, the scientists presented chimps with two containers. One yielded cooked food through a false bottom, not actually cooking, and one did not.
The chimps learned that one transforms potatoes from raw to cooked. Given a choice of which device to put food in, they almost always opted for the "cooker," showing they understood and willingly waited for the raw-to-cooked transformation.
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.news.yahoo.com ...
SEIU would demand a wage hike for that
“You lead me around on a leash!”
I'm with you on this one.
They’re still ugly and I hate them.
You’ve got a great tag-line!
E pluribus unum................
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