In this chapter, I focus on the origins of memory, posing the question of what were the very initial forces that led to the evolution of learning. Although the common answer is that the function of memory is to allow future behavior to benefit from past experiences, I argue that future benefit is too small to overcome the large energetic costs associated with the neural mechanisms that support memory formation. Instead, I advance the hypothesis that memory evolved to solve an immediate problem, the identification of novel biologically significant objects. Although such identification is often attributed to innate recognition, reliance on genetic encoding would require enormous genomic space and would be unreliable when phylogenetically novel but important objects were encountered. Some often-unappreciated features of Pavlovian conditioning make it an ideal mechanism for immediate perceptual identification of biologically important objects. Although episodic memory is most clearly identified with this recognition process, immediate perceptual identification may be a general function of several memory systems.