Whoever discovered cheese:
- Damn, my milk spoiled
- I’ll leave it out a bit longer maybe it fixes itself
- It’s better now!
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
Realizing he doesn’t get sick after eating it.
