It turns out that humans and chimpanzees share more than a common ancestor and a whole lot of DNA. A new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that chimps have several of the capacities that allowed early humans to cook their food and evolve into the species we are today. In his book “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human,” biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham hypothesizes that learning how to cook made food easier for humans to break down, allowing energy that would have gone towards digestion to fuel bigger brains. Inspired by this theory, Felix Warneken, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard, and Alexandra Rosati, his wife and colleague, set out to study chimps at the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center in the Republic of Congo. By finding out whether chimps had the capacity to cook, the team hoped to learn more about when our own species began to cook our meals. Warneken and Rosati presented chimps with a "magic cooking device" —
