Cooking skills may have emerged millions of years ago - via Mike Playfair

By Pallab Ghosh

Science correspondent, BBC News

3 June 2015 

New research suggests that chimps have most of the mental capabilities needed to cook food.

This suggests that the ability to cook food is deep seated and may have arisen in human ancestors millions of years ago.

The conclusions also indicate that humans may have developed the ability to cook very soon after they learned how to control fire.

The study has been published in one of the journals of the Royal Society.

Humans must have adopted cooking fairly early in their evolutionDr Felix Warneken, Harvard University

Surprising as it may seem, even boiling an egg requires advanced mental skills. Whereas other animals tend to start eating whatever food they find or hunt straight away, humans can store and cook their food, even if we are fairly hungry, because we know that if we wait what we eventually eat will taste better.

It seems that our ability to smack our lips at the prospect of a delicious, well prepared meal requires a similar inspired leap of the imagination as producing art, developing language and creating the technologies that make us uniquely human.

So when your mind wanders and thinks of a nice meal when you should really be paying attention to something else, be assured that it is this foodie forethought that makes us human.

Continued ...

Homo erectus was first master chef: study

Homo erectus was probably the first ancestor of modern humans to have mastered the art of cooking, according to a new US study.

The ability to cook and process food allowed Homo erectus, the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens to make huge evolutionary leaps that differentiated them from chimpanzees and other primates, said researchers at Harvard University.

Based on an analysis of DNA, molar size and body mass among non-human primates, modern humans, and 14 extinct hominids, the findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, support previous studies that suggested Homo erectus, which evolved around 1.9 million years ago, may have known how to cook.

Preparing food with tools and fire meant more calories could be consumed and less time needed to be spent foraging and eating. Molar sizes shrunk while body mass increased.

Among primates, animals with larger body sizes grew bigger molars and spent more time eating - great apes of similar size to humans spend about 48 per cent of the day consuming calories.

"Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis spent 6.1 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively, of their active day feeding," said the Harvard study, adding that modern humans spend 4.7 per cent of their days eating.

"Human feeding time and molar size are truly exceptional compared with other primates, and their oddity began around the start of the Pleistocene," said the study, referring to the epoch that began about 2.5 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago.

Cooking may actually have originated with other species that also lived in Africa and came just before homo erectus, including Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, the study said.

In any case, the tools and behaviours necessary to support a cooking culture "related to feeding and now necessary for long-term survival of modern humans evolved by the time of Homo erectus and before our lineage left Africa."