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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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
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