Green olives

Have you ever been tempted to eat an unripe olive from the tree? I guarantee you will be spitting for hours to get rid of the acrid taste. It was a huge leap of faith for Bronze Age man, somewhere in the Levant, some 7000 years ago, to transform the ripe olive, bitter as gall, to something that was actually edible by curing it with lye and salt brine. I wonder what epiphany happened for someone to figure out that olives were edible, and also a way to cure them. I bet goats were involved. They will eat anything. 

At least beer will make itself on its own, given the right circumstances, ditto that with cheese. But olives? I suspect it was the oil, which literally comes from the word for olive oil, that led to eating the fruit. Fossilized olives from 37,000 years ago were found on Santorini. As early as 3000 BC, commercial olive production probably led to the rise of the Minoan civilization. Spanish missionaries brought the olives to Mission San Diego in 1769.

The word "olive" derives from Latin ŏlīva ("olive fruit", "olive tree"), possibly through Etruscan 𐌀𐌅𐌉𐌄𐌋𐌄 (eleiva) from the archaic Proto-Greek form *ἐλαίϝα (*elaíwa) (Classic Greek ἐλαία elaía, "olive fruit", "olive tree").

The word "oil" originally meant "olive oil", from ŏlĕum,  ἔλαιον (élaion, "olive oil"). Also in multiple other languages the word for "oil" ultimately derives from the name of this tree and its fruit.

The oldest attested forms of the Greek words are the Mycenaean 𐀁𐀨𐀷, e-ra-wa, and 𐀁𐀨𐀺, e-ra-wo or 𐀁𐁉𐀺, e-rai-wo, written in the Linear B syllabic script. —Wiki