Chimps like chips. They would be cooking if they could

Chimpanzees prefer their vegetables lightly roasted. Clever experiments reveal that if our closest living relatives could only control fire they would probably be cooking

As far as we can tell, chimps don't cook. Yet a series of clever experiments show that Pan troglodytes have a taste for cooked food and the cognitive capabilities to cook. The implication is that the common ancestor of chimps and humans that lived around 2 million years ago was poised to cook. The lineage that led to humans figured out how to control fire. The chimp lineage did not.

The Guardian's science correspondent Hannah Devlin has already written an excellent article about the research, but I thought I'd share with you some of the video clips that accompany the study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society.