Other Apes Like a Cooked Meal, Too

June 4, 2008 -- Freshly cooked meals may not be an option in the wild, but an extensive taste test involving several great apes has revealed that, like humans, they seem to prefer cooked foods over raw.

The finding counters the belief that humans developed a preference for cooked chow well after we began to control fire.

Instead, it's now believed that a preference for cooked foods -- which tend to be softer and sweeter -- existed in our hominid ancestors before controlled fire emerged. Since that happened between one million and 1.6 million years ago, hominids probably began to cook their food not long thereafter, according to the new study, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Human Evolution.

"Given our evidence, early hominids would have already had a preference for the taste of cooked foods, so it is more likely that cooking may have emerged soon after the control of fire," lead author Victoria Wobber told Discovery News.

Wobber, a Harvard University anthropologist, with colleagues Brian Hare and Richard Wrangham, conducted multiple food tests using captive chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and orangutan populations from facilities in the United States, Europe and the Congo Republic.

In the first test, a group of chimps was offered a choice between raw and cooked carrots, sweet potatoes and white potatoes. The second test offered apes of each kind either cooked or raw cubed, mashed or grated carrots, since carrots came out as a chimp favorite in the first experiment.

For the third test, the apes were offered a choice between cooked or raw apple and cooked or raw beef. Finally, the researchers gave the Congo chimps, which had never eaten cooked food of any kind, a choice between cooked and raw beef.

All of the ape tasters preferred cooked over raw foods, with the exception of white potatoes and apples. In those instances, they demonstrated no preference between cooked or raw, perhaps because these items are easily chewed raw, and cooking them does not enhance their sweetness.

During the second experiment, designed to compare food textures, the apes turned their noses up to raw, grated carrots and showed that they strongly preferred the vegetable cooked and mashed.