My hypothesis for how we first discovered fermentation that creates alcohol is that it was by accident.
When it comes to alcoholic beverages, people had to have left something long enough for it to develop the right bacteria for it to ferment. The discovery of fermentation for alcohol and food preparation seem to go back even farther than I thought, like for example with the Egyptians. I have read that it was the seventeenth century when yeast and fermentation was really discovered, and able to be seen under a microscope.
As far as food preservation, my hypothesis is more or less the same, since I'm not sure how else humans would discover a process so scientific and beneficial other than by curiosity or accident. I would go about testing this hypothesis with fruit and maybe vegetables.
The fruit would stay in a container refrigerated, and the vegetables would be placed in salted water in a sealed container. I'd leave both items to sit for two months. Upon taking them out I would hopefully see how bacteria has started to change the vegetables and how the sugar in the fruit has begun to break down.
Upon learning that yeast is used to add alcohol to beverages, I would try to use yeast with half of the fruit, just to compare the difference in results from naturally fermented fruit, to a beverage with yeast. Just out of curiosity of what I could create.
