Human Civilization: Made Possible by Beer?

The evidence uncovered so far doesn't include any indication of select Bavarian hops, nor certainly of refrigeration. In fact, the method of production would be a tough sell in today's market: chew some rice, mixing it with saliva, thereby turning the grains into the base sugar to serve as feast for yeast.

But beer was there from the very beginning of the modern human experience, and as The Independent reports, a University of Pennsylvania archaeologist believes that our early taste for alcohol may have been a key ingredient in our transition to a settled-down, agrarian way of life.

Biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern draws upon evidence, mostly shards of pottery, collected from sites in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Trace amounts of tartaric acid associated with alcoholic brews have been found on shards dating back to more than 7,000 years, which is about as far back in time as we have been able to date pottery fragments. McGovern alludes to other evidence that may push back in time the genesis of alcohol production and consumption by another 2,000 years.

McGovern theorizes that once our ancestors stumbled across alcohol, they developed a taste for the stuff and consequently set about learning how to reproduce it at will, and for pretty much the precise same reasons for tippling today: an enjoyment of the taste as well as of the psychotropic effects that alcohol imparts.

Suggesting that early humans may have taken up to tending the soil more to make beer than to feed ourselves, McGovern outlines our early relationship with alcohol in his new book Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer and Other Alcoholic Beverages, telling The Independent:

"A main motivation for settling down and domesticating crops was probably to make an alcoholic beverage of some kind. People wanted to be closer to their plants so this leads to settlement."

While the concept of happy hour would take a few thousand years to arrive, our appreciation of the taste and effect of alcohol appears to run through to the very depths of the modern human experience.

Photo curtesy of cyclonebill, via Wikimedia Commons