New evidence suggests that alcohol was a surprisingly important driver in our transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
Whatever you’re consuming this festive season, it’s very likely that you didn’t have to kill it with your own hands or collect it from the wild. So you can thank your ancestors who, around 10,000 years ago, carried out one of humanity’s most dramatic transformations: they began to abandon their traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle to become farmers.
As an article in , elaborates, the reason why this happened is intriguing, given that our species had successfully survived for some 300,000 years without the need to mow and sow — not to mention milk, shear and herd.
Many ideas are put forward as possible explanations: agriculture offered a more reliable food source; or allowed people to depend less on their neighbors; or was related to the desire to remain in the same place…
“Or was it more because they wanted to get drunk with their friends? Did our ancestors turn their lives upside down because of a drink?” – asks the same magazine.
Beer more important than bread?
Anthropologists have been pondering this possibility since the 1950s. The challenge is to distinguish between beer and bread, which many consider the most likely candidate for driving the rise of agriculture.
Baking bread and brewing beer appear superficially similar in the archaeological record, says Jiajing Wangfrom Dartmouth College (USA), to New Scientist. Both involve grinding cereals and mixing them with water, leaving a starchy residue. Researchers needed a way to distinguish the starch in beer from the starch in bread. They also needed to be able to determine which one was older.
A small group of archaeologists, including Wang, spent years finding evidence of the oldest alcoholic beverage. A good starting point was later sedentary societies, such as ancient Egyptwhere beer production was clearly evident.
In Hieracompolis, in southern Egypt, for example, they found fragments of beer jugs containing cereal starch granules, yeast cells and calcium oxalate crystals, or “beer stone”. These remains show that people there produced beer from a mixture of wheat, barley and grasses among 5800 and 5600 years ago.
In 2016, Li Liu of Stanford University (USA), Wang and their colleagues described a site called Mijiayain northern China, where ceramic containers revealed traces of 5000-year-old beer production.
The oldest evidence, however, comes from the Shangshan culture, in the lower reaches of the river Yangtze, not south of China. Discovered by Liu and his colleagues two decades ago, it is one of the oldest agricultural societies, dating back to around 10,000 and 8500 years ago.
In 2021, a team led by Wang described a Shangshan site called Qiaotouwith an antiquity between 8700 and 9000 years.
It is a mound-shaped platform several meters high, surrounded by a moat. There are no houses on the mountain. Instead, it is dotted with graves, accompanied by red painted ceramics – where the team found traces of rice, Job’s tears and unidentified tuber-like growths used to brew beer.
A year ago, Liu and his colleagues described the oldest evidence of brewing in East Asia to date. His team examined 12 pottery fragments from the deepest layer of the original Shangshan site, which were ancient between 9000 and 10,000 years – the oldest phase of that culture.
The fragments contained traces of rice, other cereals such as Job’s tears, acorns and lilies — as well as remains of a ferment that contained Monascus and yeast.
To confuse matters further, it turned out that hunter-gatherers also appear to have brewed beer. The cave of Raqefet, Israelwas a Natufian burial site, where around 30 bodies were buried.
There, Liu, Wang and their colleagues found three stone mortars that had been filled with various wild plants, including wheat, barley and legumes, and then left to ferment, producing a porridge-like beer. You containers date back to between 11,700 and 13,700 years ago — proof that beer production also precedes agriculture.
The question of whether beer or bread came first remains unanswered. “We still don’t have solid evidence to answer this,” Liu told New Scientist.
Em Boy 1, in Jordanfor example, archaeologists have found evidence of “bread-like products” aged between 11,600 and 14,600 years.
