尽管它们从未学会使用火，但黑猩猩、大猩猩和猩猩也会享受烹饪的乐趣。

据美国《科学》杂志在线新闻报道，如果可以选择的话，这些灵长类动物更喜欢煮牛肉和煮胡萝卜，而非未加工的版本。这一发现表明，人类的祖先最初学会用火可能并不仅仅为了光明、温暖以及提供保护，同时还可能为了满足天生对于经过烧烤的食物的渴望。烹饪同时能够提供大量的生物学优势，例如使食物更容易咀嚼和消化，甚至能够扩充大脑。研究人员在最近出版的爱思唯尔期刊《人类进化杂志》（Journal of Human Evolution）上报告了这一研究成果。

推荐原始出处：

Journal of Human Evolution，Volume 55, Issue 2, August 2008, Pages 340-348，Victoria Wobber, Richard Wrangham

Great apes prefer cooked food

Victoria Wobber, Brian Hare,  and Richard Wrangham

Abstract

The cooking hypothesis proposes that a diet of cooked food was responsible for diverse morphological and behavioral changes in human evolution. However, it does not predict whether a preference for cooked food evolved before or after the control of fire. This question is important because the greater the preference shown by a raw-food-eating hominid for the properties present in cooked food, the more easily cooking should have been adopted following the control of fire. Here we use great apes to model food preferences by Paleolithic hominids. We conducted preference tests with various plant and animal foods to determine whether great apes prefer food items raw or cooked. We found that several populations of captive apes tended to prefer their food cooked, though with important exceptions. These results suggest that Paleolithic hominids would likewise have spontaneously preferred cooked food to raw, exapting a pre-existing preference for high-quality, easily chewed foods onto these cooked items. The results, therefore, challenge the hypothesis that the control of fire preceded cooking by a significant period.