homo erectus was on to something

I think about this more often than I probably should.

Somewhere, hundreds of thousands of years ago, a Homo erectus was staring at a fire. Maybe lightning started it. Maybe a volcano. Maybe somebody accidentally set a bush ablaze while trying to impress a cave crush.

Whatever happened, there was a fire.

And somewhere nearby was a piece of meat.

At some point, one brave soul looked at that meat and thought:

"You know what? I'm gonna put that on the fire."

That person changed history.

Forget the wheel.

Forget agriculture.

Forget the invention of spreadsheets and conference calls.

The first person who cooked meat is responsible for every backyard barbecue, every steakhouse, every roadside smoke shack, every Argentine asado, every Brazilian churrasco, every Texas brisket, and every uncle who owns six different thermometers.

The question is this:

What did that person evolve into?

Did he become a Texan pitmaster?

The kind of person who wakes up at 3:00 a.m. to tend a smoker the size of a submarine. The kind who speaks in brisket temperatures and regards oak wood as a sacred object. The kind who says things like, "It's done when it's done," while staring into a smoker with the seriousness of a NASA engineer.

Or did he become a South American gaucho?

Standing beside a fire under an endless sky. A whole side of beef leaning against iron crosses. A knife on his belt. A mate in one hand. Cooking meat simply because meat, fire, and time are all that is required for happiness.

Personally, I think the answer is both.

The first cook wasn't following a recipe.

He wasn't measuring temperatures.

He wasn't arguing on the internet about reverse searing.

He was just curious.

Curious enough to see what happened when fire met food.

That same curiosity is what led somebody to smoke a brisket for sixteen hours.

It's what led somebody else to skewer an entire animal over embers in Argentina.

It's what led us to invent barbecue sauce, chimichurri, mop sauce, dry rubs, compound butters, and probably at least three thousand different opinions about how to cook ribs.

The more I think about it, the first cook was probably less Texan and less gaucho.

He was just a guy standing next to a fire.

A guy who accidentally discovered that cooked meat tastes better than raw meat.

And if we're being honest, that's still pretty much what we're doing today.

We've added fancy smokers.

We've added grills.

We've added pellet cookers, Bluetooth thermometers, and social media accounts dedicated entirely to brisket bark.

But at the end of the day it's still the same story.

A human.

A fire.

A piece of meat.

And the hope that dinner is going to be amazing.

The first Homo erectus may not have known it, but he didn't just cook dinner.

He started barbecue.