Chimps Would Cook if Given the Chance, Research Says

[IDemo]

McDonald's Corporation expresses interest:

Chimpanzees have the cognitive ability to cook, according to new research, if only someone would give them ovens.

It’s not that the animals are ready to go head-to-head with Gordon Ramsay, but scientists from Harvard and Yale found that chimps have the patience and foresight to resist eating raw food and to place it in a device meant to appear, at least to the chimps, to cook it.

<>

The chimps showed a number of indications that, given a real cooking opportunity, they had the ability to take advantage of it. They resisted eating raw food and put it in the device, waiting for cooked food. They would bring raw food from one side of a cage to the other in order to put it in the device. And they put different kinds of food in the device.

Dr. Rosati said the experiments showed not only that chimps had the patience for cooking, but that they had the “minimal causal understanding they would need” to make the leap to cooking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/us/chimps-can-cook-a-mean-potato-research-says.html