My Thesis is Based on a Floating Log

From time to time I get interested in the origins of food.  Not my food specifically you understand but food in general.  I know there are those out there who do wonder about the origins of their food specifically.  Is it ethically sourced?  Is it free range?  Does it come from a country with a history of using ground glass as a thickening agent?  Does it in fact bear even the slightest resemblance to what appears on the ingredients list?
I don't worry about any of that stuff.  I've pretty much subcontracted those concerns out to the relevant government and industry regulatory bodies partly because I'm lazy but mainly because it seems silly to have this government and not make use of it.  It isn't a perfect system by any means as those folk in Britain who wound up eating Romanian horsemeat will tell you but on the plus side I've so far gone forty four years without fatal food poisoning.

No when I say "origin of food" I mean in the more general "how the hell did we wind up eating this stuff in the first place" context.  What caveman walking along the beach spotted a lump of rotting fish hurled up by the tide and thought "you know, if that were wetter and slimier I'll bet it would be delicious".  Did the caveman make the connection between the dead fish on the beach and the possibility of fresher versions in the nearby water immediately?  Or was there a long hungry period of hunting for fish herds in the nearby forest before the penny finally dropped?

As our enlightened (and by now, no doubt, starving) caveman shoved a convenient log into the water and paddled eagerly to where the fish herds grazed did he realise the momentous step he was taking?  Could he, in some way, grasp that he was commencing a journey that would culminate in ocean liners and endless reruns of Deadliest Catch?  Well of course he didn't.  He was focusing his attention on hitting fish with a club and trying to avoid being the person to discover drowning.

The concept of human development as a seamless, ongoing process is largely rubbish.  Mostly it has been a cobbling together of bits of accidentally acquired insights with some adhoc guessing and the occasional bright idea.  Human development only gains coherence in hindsight when we're trying to explain it to our kids in some way that doesn't make our ancestors look completely like highly fortunate idiots.  Its only in the last century or so that we've reached the point where extrapolating where scientific discoveries are likely to take us has become the province of people other than science fiction writers (who haven't been around much longer themselves).  Up until that point we were just making things up as we went along.  This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, most of human effort even today falls into the same category.  The fact that a small group of highly intelligent people can now start to make some (moderately) educated guesses as to what the future may hold is entirely due to the messy patchwork of achievements we've attained so far without their help.  In order to see the future you need something a little more reliable than a floating log to stand on.