Hard to find a good answer for this. After discovering fire, were early humans just wondering what would happen if they put meat and other foods over the fire? Did they learn that eating uncooked meat can make them sick?
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I came across a dead deer once when walking through the remains of a brushfire. A primitive person finding this would not waste the meat, and cooked meat has two things going for it…It is easier to chew, and also…it takes longer to spoil compared to raw meat.
Brushfires are a regular occurrence in nature. It wouldn’t take much to make the connection, even for a primitive brain.
Eat raw meat. The fresher the better because when people eat old raw meat they get sick. Or animals come for it if it’s around too long. It gets smelly.
Eat raw meat around fire at night. Meat is a bit cold. We like warm meat. Hold some meat against fire. Fire makes it warm again. Nice.
Hold raw meat against fire too long. Strange taste around the edges. Not bad. Different. Share with others. Others hold meat close to fire. Someone holds it on a stick because hand too hot holding it close.
Leftover meat in the morning. Some was heated before, some was still raw. The heated meat doesn’t smell bad like the raw meat does. And it can be heated again. No smell means less competitors coming. So that’s good. And we can rest for the day. That’s good too.
We all eat fire meat now. Hunt the animal, kill it, cut up the meat far away, leave the bones and guts behind and bring back the meat chunks. Heat up the chunks. Fewer animals attracted. Less sick after. Meat lasts longer when heated. Some of it got heated but dried up so we didn’t eat that the next day.
That dried up meat didn’t get touched for days because we had plenty. But then we didn’t. And someone tried it. Chewy. Tough. But not bad. Need to drink a lot of water with it though. Not as good as hot meat but it means we can not hunt for an extra day or two, so that’s good.
Someone collected a lot of that dried meat. Kept it dry and hidden. Wrapped it in leaves to keep the crawl things off it. Then days started getting colder. Harder to find meat. They brought it out and we ate it for many days. Very good idea. Next year we save even more and perhaps get through the cold days until warm days come back.
They always do.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. We can’t eat most raw meat now because after we started cooking the food we evolved away from being able to properly digest it uncooked. You need to remember it took a very long time and I’m sure accidents led to many food discoveries. Like leaving corn too close to a fire and it popped. Maybe some raw meat fell into a fire and not wanting to waste it someone ate it.
You can imagine some early humans accidentally dropping some food into their fire. “Ahhh we worked hard to get that”, grabs a stick to pull it out and figures “why not 🤷♀️“ and eats it anyway. “Mmm that tasted good. Might try it again”. Could also happen that they used stones to contain their fire, or stones happen to be at the edge, and the food fell on them and cooked before being salvaged.
You can then see humans trying out different foods and seeing what worked.
Random extra fact; we learned to use fire before we were human but after we learned to use tools. The line of human ancestry is homo habilis, then homo erectus, followed by us, Homo sapiens. Homo habilis learned to use tools (the translation of homo habilis could be viewed as literally meaning “handy man”), but it wasn’t until homo erectus that there is evidence of us utilising fire. I listened to the first chapter of a series of lectures called “Food: a culinary history) done by Ken Albala done for The Great Courses. The first lecture is about prehistory food and includes a bit about fire utilisation
I’d imagine that early humans were just like us. See fire, decide to throw random objects in fire, watch it burn in a trance like state. Eventually, throw oh i dont know, brontosaurus leg in fire, watch it burn, but all of a sudden, it smells yummy. Investigate by touching leg in fire(safely or not) and licking fingers. Something tastes finger licking good, risk 3rd degree burns to pull brontosaurus leg out the fire, put meat in mouth. Success.
There’s not going to be a good answer to this, even if people post about it here because we have no documentation that’s survived from that time period. We’ll have guess at best, unfortunately. Unless someone has a time machine and didn’t tell anyone. Otherwise, we just don’t know. We don’t even know how humans because to use fire.
THOUGH it is obvious what happens when someone eats raw meat. The likelihood of you getting sick is high and ancient people aren’t idiots. They can perceive cause and effect. And, for much of human history, we were always on the verge of starvation. So desperation PROBABLY made ancient people try all sorts of different things to try to preserve food for the long term. We do have foods like cheese and wine and beef jerky and whatnot after all. Whatever it takes to survive.
TL:dr; we don’t actually know and probably won’t know but ancient people can see themselves and others getting sick so they probably just tried whatever to see what worked.
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