<human>:  Why did people start cooking?
<bot>: The first humans probably cooked food because they had to. It was either that or starve. It’s hard to imagine that people would have been able to survive without cooking, so we can assume that cooking was invented by our ancestors. It’s possible that early humans discovered fire by accident, and then learned how to control it. They probably started by making fires to keep warm, and then learned how to cook food.