One period I am curious about would be the times during which early humans were exploring Europe: I’ve read the books about Ayla (Clan of the Cave Bear) by J. Auel and it would be interesting to see how close they were. In the story, Ayla was the first to tame wild animals (a horse, then later a cave lion), and one of the first to discover the use of flint to make fire.

In the meantime (and veering back on topic) since hearing about it lutefisk has been a bit of a culinary mystery to me, though I’ve never eaten it so the mystery is based only on the complicated arrangements for making it (which I read about here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutefisk).

Similarly Saltpetre/peter – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_nitrate. Just who stuck with the unenviable task of this process – “…stale urine is placed in a container of straw and is allowed to “sour” (bacterially ferment) for many months…” – until they got it right???

I think outside of these two (squeamishly olfactic) examples, I’ve always been fascinated by bakelite and would have liked to track its development as a new material in the last century.