The smell of perking coffee and frying bacon would have done the trick for the cognition, at least in the morning.
I don’t know about the coffee, but once you’ve seen the natives collecting roasted lizards, goanna, fried kangaroo and koala after a bushfire, there’s no mystery about how and where cooking was ‘invented’ -
And fire sacrifice was nothing but following example...if the ‘gods’ want their offering charred, that’s what we’ll send them. Hey, no primitive man in his right mind would wake up one morning and say to himself, I think I’ll get some wood, make a fire and burn my mammoth/deer/horse to a crisp before I eat it...
He got the idea from scavenging after the fire passed through.