We’ve probably always foraged eggs from birds from before we were even modern humans.
Eggs are an easy source of protein and calories that don’t take much of a fight.
Chances are the unfertilized egg (what we use today, generally,) probably got started being used when they domesticated chickens sometime around 5,000 BCE (iirc,) in south east Asia (where chickens were first domesticated.)
Egyptians, Greeks, Roman’s all had robust poultry. (even Mars loved him some fried chicken,)
For most of our history, we would have used everything we could from livestock, so it would have been a matter of time.
Do you really want to know?
It's simple. You tie up the rabbit so it can't move, then you force feed it chocolate.
Then you force it to shit into a mold. while it's still warm it becomes egg-shaped.
(actually I never understood that one either, I'm just making shit up here. though. not the cruelest thing we've ever done for food.)
It's paganism and the christians back in the day wanted to make it easier for the pagans to convert so they added pagan holidays and made them christian holidays. Which is why Easter has eggs and bunnies. Both are fertile idols in paganism and are in spring.
Because pre-historic Filipinos looked at their bowl of foraged berries, tubers, leaves, and meat and said, "I bet a fried egg on this would be tits."
The chicken is unique in that it wants to keep laying eggs until it fills its nest up, where other birds will just lay a set number. This means if you take the egg every day, you suddenly have an egg machine on your hands. Eggs being very nutritious, this is very advantageous. This made it one of the earlier domesticated animals we have evidence for.
If memory serves anyway.
Early humans ate a lot of things.
The ones that ate non-food things died.
The ones that ate eggs lived and passed on their genes.
Eggs are a typical foraging food. Our ancestors likely grabbed any eggs they could find when they could find them. Eventually we started farming in SE Asia and the ancestors of the chicken hung out near the plentiful feedstock of rice fields and made their nests nearby. Over time they got used to humans and we kept taking their eggs, as we had done when we found their eggs in the wild. Around 3,000 years ago we had the chicken, an easy to care for food pooping source of meat that we had bred to poop food regardless of time of year. The bird later spread all over the planet.
Fastfoward to more recent times and we have selectively bred and drugged up a bird that reliably poops food every day and can yield the maximum amount of meat possible.
I used to eat from my umbilical cord, but damn if I couldn't afford the rent after the first 9 months...
Disclaimer: Speculation
Probably because our primitive ancestors saw other creatures eating eggs, and thought to themselves 'hey, that must be food'
A better question would be, when did we start cooking eggs?... 🤔
Awesome! 👍
Side note though, experts advise that people make sure their eggs are fully cooked, to avoid the bird flu.
So, no over easy for a while..
I would go even further: Our primitive ancestors likely descended from proto-humans that descended from primates that were already foraging eggs. Some modern apes and other mammals eat eggs as well, we've likely been eating eggs since hundreds of thousands of years before the first human evolved.
In a sense, that line of though is interesting: When we think of "observing other animals eating something, and then deciding to eat it", we're almost implicitly forgetting that we are descendants of exactly those types of animals, that "just know" what is safe to eat, and that some of the knowledge we have about food is potentially passed down from even before the first primates evolved.
Still, it kinda begs the bigger question...
When exactly did our ancient ancestors observe that eggs come from a creature's ass, and decide 'hey, this is okay to eat, let's make it a daily breakfast'?
Exactly! I mean.. some reptiles eat eggs, so we could be talking about something that happened before our ancestors had developed the concept of an ass. I don't think it's far-fetched to think that eating eggs may be as old a concept as eggs themselves. In that case, the first egg-eaters evolved alongside the first egg-layers, and were eating proto-eggs before even the modern egg existed.
Imagine if zebras started evolving very tough placentas over time, and the foals started lying around in them for a couple days before popping out: Lions would keep eating newborn zebras, and no single lion generation would notice that they were slightly different from 1000 years prior. Give that development a million years or whatever and you now have egg-laying zebras and egg-eating lions!
A better question would be, when did we start cooking eggs?... 🤔
I'm no anthropologist, but I'm gonna go ahead and guess once we started lighting stuff on fire
Again, more speculation, but maybe our ancient ancestors stumbled on some random eggs already cooked from a natural forest fire, and then thought 'hey, this fire stuff seems useful'...
Nearly every animal will eat an egg given the right oppourtunity. It makes sense given it has everything needed to create a new animal. The same goes for milk for mammals.
It feels like (and this may not have been your intention) this question kindof implies an understanding that humans and chickens coexisted for a time and humans didn't eat the chickens' eggs until they "decided" one day to try chicken eggs and decided they liked them and would continue the practice. It seems much more likely that humans inherited the practice of eating eggs from their pre-human ancestors. As to chickens specifically, modern domesticated chickens are considered the same species as wild "red junglefowl" from which they were domesticated. Red junglefowl are native to southeast Asia, and humans first made it to there probably between 35,000 and 50,000 years ago. So, if red junglefowl qualify as "chickens", I think the answer is highly likely that the first humans who encountered them in southeast Asia 35,000 to 50,000 years ago started eating their eggs because they weren't that different from the eggs of other birds they were already eating and found tasty.
Wasn't the first eggs we ate as a species and they were relatively easy to get compared to larger game or birds that flew
We probably started eating eggs in general cause we saw other animals eating them and we liked protein too.
Eggs don't make me wonder. What makes me wonder are edible flowers like artichokes.
Fermented foods are where I get confused. Who thought it was a good idea to eat cabbage that they left in a sealed pot for a few months.
I'm assuming someone got desperate.
Foods that are poisonous if not cooked also... Various types of beans, Cassava, etc.
It’s really easy to imagine it happening in a time before refrigeration.
Fermentation can happen quite fast, especially in warmer climates. My wife ferments mustard greens (similar to sauerkraut) for only a day or two depending on the temperature. It’s easy to imagine someone concluding “if a day tastes this good, I wonder what 5 days tastes like?”. And so on until they eventually recognize the preservative nature of fermenting.