Humans were both endurance hunters and passive scavengers, as well as gatherers of fruit and veg, but as their tools advanced and projectiles became sharper and deadlier, ambush hunting became a valid and successful tactic.
This feels intuitively right - it seems to me resourcefulness is our primary behavioral advantage. In pre-history I like to imagine Homo sapiens as behavioral wild cards. Somethings work sometimes, and others other times. Hell, how else do you get to cheese without a heaping helping of intelligent curiosity combined with desperation and luck.
Yeah, though sometimes our intuition can be way off lol, so I always like to dig a little deeper just in case. You're right though, our ability to improvise is something to cherish, and though I can't imagine how one discovered cheese, I do know that mongols used to survive by drinking a mixture of the milk and blood of their own horses, so chunky, moldy milk isn't too far a stretch!
Cant remember if i read this somewhere orbmade it up - but i imagine cheese might have been the result of storing milk in a fairly fresh cows stomach being used as a water skin. If you put milk in their instead of water the rennet in the stomach might curdle the milk - and thats the big realization moment we'd need.
I think i made that up.
lol! worth looking up though!