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

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.
So when did we first develop this ability?
To find out, according to Dr Felix Warneken of Harvard University conducted a simian MasterChef contest in which he conducted a series of experiments on chimpanzees to see whether they had what it took to be cooks. Clearly chimps can't cook and so there was no point in giving them a bag of shopping and letting them loose in a kitchen with assorted pots and pans, amusing though the spectacle might have been. Instead, Dr Warneken carried out a series of experiments to test the individual cognitive skills the chimps needed to be able to cook. He looked to see if they preferred cooked rather than raw food, whether they could wait until raw food could be cooked and if they would put raw food into a box that scientists switched for cooked food.
He found that they passed all these tests and more.