Having learned to control fire (Discovery 01) and to store seeds (Discovery 06), humans mastered two entirely different ways of transforming raw ingredients into something new: changing them instantly with fire (cooking), and changing them slowly by trusting time (fermenting). Anthropologist Richard Wrangham's 'Cooking Hypothesis' argues that cooking food was the decisive event that let the human brain grow while easing the burden of digestion, with roughly one-million-year-old traces of fire use at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa (Berna et al., 2012, PNAS) among the strongest supporting evidence. The history of fermenting is, surprisingly, even more striking: in 2018 a Stanford team led by Li Liu found the world's oldest known beer-brewing residue in 13,000-year-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel — made not for daily meals but for a ritual feast honoring the dead, before agriculture had even begun. In Greek myth, Dionysus taught humans to make wine from grapes; in Chinese legend, a man named Du Kang accidentally discovered fermentation when grain he had left in a mulberry-tree hollow turned to wine, a legend later immortalized when the poet Cao Cao wrote, 'What can dissolve my sorrows? Only Du Kang.'