Is This Common Drink the Foundation of Society?

There’s an old myth which states that the first alcoholic beverages – likely a mealy, thick, calorically dense version of beer – were discovered by accident. The idea goes that our nomadic ancestors started encouraging local plant life to grow in areas that they knew they would return to, so that they could harvest the – still mostly wild – growth each year. For a long time, historians believed that these nomads utilized the grains by mashing them and mixing them with water to make a sort of rustic flatbread. In time, they started maintaining the plots of grain, and switched to agrarian communities based on farming grains and fruits. Meanwhile, perhaps due to a failed or forgotten batch of bread, they discovered beer. It has the same building blocks as bread: grain, yeast, water; it’s not hard to imagine an early Mesopatamian forgetting his dough until it had already fermented, and from there discovering the mood-altering effects.

So there you have it: intentional support of wild grains leading to development of a more nutritionally dense method of eating it, which in turn led to inventing an entirely new way of life based on building homes and cities around fertile land, and continued experimenting and experience leading to beer. Whatever way you spin it, people have been eating bread and drinking beer since the dawn of time.

More recently, however, scientists have suggested that the order of events is entirely flipped around. (By recently, I mean the 1950s, and by scientists, I largely mean the work of botanist Jonathan D. Sauer). While this hypothesis was originally treated as rather humorous, recent evidence suggests that we were drinking beer at least 13,000 years ago. We have found brewing equipment at sites like Abu Huyreyra and Gobekli Tepe, including grinding and mashing tools, and huge limestone vats that tested positive for a compound found in the fermentation of grain.

These sites were not cities– they were places of worship, where people gathered but did not live. Hunter-gatherers, before the invention of farming, were harvesting grains suited to beer making and fermenting them for ritual worship.

So historians today are more likely to posit that it was in the pursuit of more regularly accessible booze that our ancient ancestors settled down, built up walls and a plot of land. Bread, as nutritious and important as it is, came later, after we’d been sitting around drinking for a while.