With some hesitation, they tried a little bit of it, and waited anxiously for the next morning. The family then went to sleep, and, at dawn, apparently no ill- effect was observed. After a number of such hesitant experiments by themselves and others in the group as well, it was concluded that cooking improves taste and is not harmful, and they decided to continue from then on. Obviously, they didn't think at all about germs, since Pasteur wasn't born yet. Children will also put their fingers in the fire, but as they burn themselves, they learn from their mistake and don't do it again.
Enhanced survival is the test of adaptation.
In principle this argument makes a certain amount of sense on the face of it, but overlooks the fact that, by cooking, many inedible foods become edible, and thus confer a significant adaptive advantage in an uncertain and wild environment, since the range of the diet is extended. Kung San in their marginal environment can be in part attributed to the use of fire and other types of rudimentary food processing, without which life would be much more difficult, perhaps impossible. Idealist views of nature contradicted by examples of foods obtainable by actual hunter- gatherers. It has been claimed by numerous raw- foodists that originally humans started cooking because, as they migrated out of the tropical African climate in which the species began, fruits became unavailable in winter, and the only way to be able to eat a sufficient amount of food or meat was to cook it. Again, this argument might make some sense if one could point to at least a few tribes in tropical countries who consumed predominantly raw fruit, but this is simply not the case.