Warneken Felix, Rosati Alexandra G
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Proc Biol Sci. 2015 Jun 22;282(1809):20150229. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2015.0229.
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.
向熟食饮食的转变代表了人类生态与进化中的一个重要转变。烹饪需要一系列复杂的认知能力，包括因果推理、自我控制和预期规划。人类是否独特地拥有烹饪食物所需的认知能力？我们探讨人类的近亲之一黑猩猩（Pan troglodytes）是否具备烹饪所需的一般领域认知技能。通过九项研究，我们表明黑猩猩：（i）更喜欢熟食；（ii）理解烹饪时生食物发生的转变，并将这种因果理解推广到新的情境中；（iii）愿意付出时间成本来获取熟食；（iv）愿意主动放弃生食物的所有权以便对其进行加工；以及（v）能够运输生食物，并为了未来烹饪的机会而储存生食物。总体而言，我们的结果表明，参与烹饪所需的几种基本心理能力可能在猿类和人类的最后共同祖先中就已存在，早于对火的控制。
