answer:I’m going to go out on a limb and make the assumption that shortly after the discovery of how to reliably make a fire, water was first heated because it was damn cold outside and drinking heated water felt good. And then either by accident or experimentation, it was discovered that tea could be made by putting various herbs and good tasting leaves in the water. And then they realized that heating the water till bubbles start rolling made the best tasting tea (as opposed to just warm water). And after that came meats, veggies, soups, stews and all that other good stuff. Now, if you mean boiling water to sterilize things and realizing that it was because it killed bacteria, that’s a whole nuther thing and took a WHOLE lot more hundreds of years indeed :)