(Image: Alexandra Rosati)
“Chimps offer us an amazing opportunity to better understand how some of our most complex behaviour may have evolved” (Image: Kris Snibbe/Harvard University)
Why try to gauge the ability of chimpanzees to grasp the concept of cooking?
Cooking food spurred a fundamental change in the human species. Cooking makes many foods more digestible and allows us to extract more energy – things we need to sustain our large brains. But we don’t know when or how cooking evolved.
By looking at our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, we have an opportunity to make comparisons with our closest evolutionary ancestors…
