If early humans found out that if they cooked meat it was better for them, why did it take thousands of years for us to find out about germs?
In: Biology
You can also check out Snow Macaques and salted yams. It shows how culture tastes are formed and dispersed through a primitive culture.
A snow macaque discovered that yams dipped in salt water became delicious. He taught this to his friends, who began bullying any ape that didn’t dunk their potatoes into the sea water. Eventually, all of the other Macaques were forced into accepting the custom, completely unaware of the nutritional benefits to the minerals in the sea water.
It took us thousands of years to see microbes. Why would you believe there were super tiny organisms making people sick if you couldn’t see it with your eye?
It took over a million years to get from cooking meat to knowing about germs. Cooking predates our species (homo sapiens). So they didn’t figure out cooked meat was better, they knew it all along.
You can understand cause and effect without understanding the underlying reason.
I don’t need to know (or understand) quantum physics to know that if I heat an ice cube it will melt.
If I do X and Y occurs reliably is something anyone can observe and teach others.
Discovering an underlying reason WHY something happens is a side issue.
It didn’t. Have you ever heard of institutional knowledge? Information can be lost to time and attrition. Discovered, Lost, and Rediscovered.
It took thousands of years to discover gems because it took thousands of years to create something that could prove they exist.
We always kinda knew that SOMETHING was there that caused food to go off or just smell bad, but because microbes are so small, only when we started inventing things like microscopes did we really understand specifically what those things were.
And even then, even today we still don’t fully understand a lot of things about microbes.
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