This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher in D'Alga.

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If you cozy up to a campfire this summer, ponder what Charles Darwin called, quote,

probably the greatest discovery ever made by man,

the control of fire.

The anthropologist and primitologist Richard Wrenham

has argued that the control of fire and thus cooking has actually shaped our bodies and our brains.

But cooking isn't just about controlling fire.

When you think about cooking it actually has a lot of really complex components.

Yale psychologist Alexandra Rosati.

So you have to plan for the future, you have to have some self-control by refraining to eat raw food

you already have right now.

You might want to have some causal reasoning to understand how cooking

transforms the food.

She and her colleague Felix Varnikin at Harvard

wanted to know if Champs also possess these basic cognitive qualities,

even though they don't cook or control fire.

So they performed a series of experiments in a chimps sanctuary in the will patiently refrain from eating raw food right in front of them if they think there's

a chance it might get cooked.

The chimps will even load raw food into what they thought was a cooking device.

In reality, a container with a false bottom, by which researchers would replace the raw food with cooked.

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