The best musings start with some kind of related anecdote. Like, someone musing on the violence of the human condition will relate to us a time they saw a kid push another kid over while playing in the park. It helps to give the impression that the muser has a lot going on in their life, which helped to inform the insight they’re about to share with us.

I don’t have such a natural lead in to what I’ve been pondering. It’s just something I often wonder about when I’m doing other things, like filling out my taxes or driving my car. Basically, I often wonder about the start of things. Hugely original, I know. Clearly I’m the first person to ever think about this sort of thing. But when it comes to the things we take for granted, it’s the sort of question which lives rent-free in my head. Some of them have obvious enough answers. Like walking upright. As funny as it is to imagine one ape to start walking entirely hands-free before it catches on with the others, it was obviously a more gradual process which happened over a long period of time.

But what about cooking food? Who was the first proto-human to realize that if you burned your meat a little bit (but not completely), it tasted better? How many isolated incidents of individuals discovering this were there before it just became the norm?

Or alcohol? It’s been speculated by some that the desire to booze it up was a notable motivation in the formation of non-nomadic civilizations and agricultural societies. But who was the first person who figured out fermentation?

It does get you wondering if something one of us is doing in our daily lives will end up having an impact on human civilization that we might not even live to see. Or, like the Earl of Sandwich, we might get to claim the credit for something that existed for a long time before we ever got our grubby little hands on it.