Data from: Cognitive capacities for cooking in chimpanzees

The transition to a cooked diet represents an important shift in human
ecology and evolution. Cooking requires a set of sophisticated cognitive
abilities, including causal reasoning, self-control and anticipatory
planning. Do humans uniquely possess the cognitive capacities needed to
cook food? We address whether one of humans' closest relatives,
chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), possess the domain-general cognitive skills
needed to cook. Across nine studies, we show that chimpanzees: (i) prefer
cooked foods; (ii) comprehend the transformation of raw food that occurs
when cooking, and generalize this causal understanding to new contexts;
(iii) will pay temporal costs to acquire cooked foods; (iv) are willing to
actively give up possession of raw foods in order to transform them; and
(v) can transport raw food as well as save their raw food in anticipation
of future opportunities to cook. Together, our results indicate that
several of the fundamental psychological abilities necessary to engage in
cooking may have been shared with the last common ancestor of apes and
humans, predating the control of fire.