I’m sure I have some terminology wrong, but the first stages of humans, cavemen, homo erectus, what have you... how did they know to cook their meat/food? My roommate thinks they stumbled upon cooking by accident, I tend to think it’s from a higher level thinking/evolving somehow. Perhaps we’re both right. I’m sure it’s been asked before, and yes this debate stemmed from us cooking dinner and asking “I wonder who was the first guy to set a chicken on fire and eat it.” But thanks for indulging us. A brief google search only gave the history of cooking. I’m less concerned about when or even why, but how. How did they know to put their food on fire?
You might get good responses over at /r/Askanthropology - since this is a question about prehistory.
You'll get a negative response there, however, if you use the word "caveman" because from an archaeological point of view it conjures up images of "primitive" that represents an older way to consider human evolution. Use the term "early hominids" and you'll get points for being a well-informed insider!
Of course, any answer is going to be speculative. One possibility one often hears from paleo-archaeologists is that early hominids scavenged meat after wildfires and found that those critters tasted a whole lot better when exposed to fire. Fire also played an essential role in reducing the size of teeth and chewing muscles: raw meat is extremely difficult to chew, so by cooking it there was an evolutionary advantage that allowed fewer calories being devoted to the growth of muscles, big jaws and teeth, and it infused more protein and fat into the diet, which was important in growing larger brains. Of course, none of that is self evident if we consider most people today. Those who come to /r/AskHistorians being excluded from that final observation since they are clearly part of the top 1 percent.