"MEAAAAAAAAT!!!" - The First Chef

Whoever discovered cheese:

Damn, my milk spoiled
I'll leave it out a bit longer maybe it fixes itself
It's better now!

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There's an old Arab folk tale that cheese came from a merchant packing the milk under a pile of goods on a pack animal, and only remembering it after the end of a long journey!

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- If it was packed in a skin made from a calf’s stomach this could work
  
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- It's because he didn't know this piece of wisdom
  
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I think about this often. You have to figure, that first cheese wouldn't have been a refined block with a selected bacteria culture. The easiest thing to make is cottage cheese - chunks of partially fermented lactose and fat suspended in what is still mostly milk, but... it wouldn't have been done in an intentional, sterile way... so you'd probably have something like bleu cheese with some mold in it but still wet and runny and just kind of loosely chunky (imagine you let an open container of cottage cheese sit out until it starts going bad).

So who was the first person that was desperate enough to try eating that... and how did they convince the next person to eat it?

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- It wasn’t easy to make water vessels. Animal stomachs were commonly used. A baby mammal stomach would make cottage cheese if you store milk in it at room temperature, and since they didn’t have refrigeration, not a difficult accident to discover.
  
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Can I just say, as an avid amateur fan of archaeology, that I hate the term 'cave man' and wish people would stop using it. It's based on the ignorant idea that just because we find stone-age tools in caves, that was the place where everyone lived. They didn't. Quite the opposite, in fact, and it's the reason we find such things in caves- because people don't go into caves very often, the are often untouched by most weather, and they don't do things like plow over them.

We know from other archaeology, in fact, that homo sapiens were already living in huts in the paleolithic, meaning that our pre-homo sapiens ancestors probably were too. It's not like it takes a lot of brains or even skills to build a simple hut.

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They probably encountered cooked meat after a forest fire and tried to replicate it. A pig that died hiding in a burning log, cooked low and slow for hours, is basically barbecue.

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More like random forest fire makes animals crispy. Caveman smells something weird. Finds an already cooked meal. It tastes better than their regular food. Starts burning everything and tasting it.

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Realizing he doesn't get sick after eating it.

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Realizes his buddy doesn’t get sick after being dared to eat it, more likely.

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I remember listening to this biologist talking about how cooking meat was a big step in us becoming the dominant species in the world as digesting cooked meat requires less energy than digesting raw meat, the cooking already breaks the larger proteins. Because of this, less meat gives more energy, allowing more energy available for our brain.

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Cooking almost any raw food makes more nutrients readily absorbable, not just meat.

Not to mention killing harmful microorganisms will help you and your tribe live longer.

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Known as the Big Brain Explosion.

(Well not really, the big brain explosion was before cooking. So it's thought it started when we started scavenging meat. But I'm sure cooking meat contributed even more!)

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You seem to have knowledge. I read somewhere that cooking food helps break down the food so humans spend less calories absorbing the nutrients from it. The helps us conserve calories that helped lead to what you called the Big Brain Explosion.

Do you know of this happening anywhere else in nature? Could we start some animals on a cooked food diet and measure any brain growth or behavior change? Am I just speaking gibberish?

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- I feed my dogs cooked meat quite often, they're still pretty stupid.
  
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- Well the rest of this is my own thinking. What this effectively does is free up calories. What happens with those extra calories depends on the evolutionary pressure. The species could just hunt/eat less and continue on just as they were, or they could switch to more secure or less dangerous foods. For most animals hunting is dangerous, so less hunting would be simply better. For humans, better (more intelligent) use of hunting tools lead to better survival, so the evolutionary pressure is bigger brain to better use tools. For a tiger, more calories could lead to bigger claws or something, or less hunting.
  
  I also think that intelligence depends on the ability to manipulate the environment around you. We have hands and fingers to make things, tools, houses, etc. However intelligent an elephant is, they can never really manipulate the environment around them to great extent. So their evolutionary pressure for bigger brains maxes out. There's just no need. You see those cartoons about the super intelligent dolphin? Well I don't think that would ever happen because they can never manipulate the environment round them.
  
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