Alcohol's Neolithic Origins Brewing Up a Civilization

Subject:	Alcohol's Neolithic Origins Brewing Up a Civilization
Date:	Fri, 25 Dec 2009 08:23:22 -0800 (PST)

Did early man turn to growing food in the form of grain and fruits to
make booze? This is a well-known and constantly discussed subject, but
here's another take from the German magazine Spiegel and Patrick
McGovern of theBiomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine,
Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania
Museum.

12/24/2009 11:43 AM
Alcohol's Neolithic Origins
Brewing Up a Civilization

By Frank Thadeusz

Did our Neolithic ancestors turn to agriculture so that they could be
sure of a tipple? US Archaeologist Patrick McGovern thinks so. The
expert on identifying traces of alcohol in prehistoric sites reckons
the thirst for a brew was enough of an incentive to start growing
crops.

It turns out the fall of man probably didn't begin with an apple. More
likely, it was a handful of mushy figs that first led humankind
astray.

Here is how the story likely began -- a prehistoric human picked up
some dropped fruit from the ground and popped it unsuspectingly into
his or her mouth. The first effect was nothing more than an agreeably
bittersweet flavor spreading across the palate. But as alcohol entered
the bloodstream, the brain started sending out a new message --
whatever that was, I want more of it!

Humankind's first encounters with alcohol in the form of fermented
fruit probably occurred in just such an accidental fashion. But once
they were familiar with the effect, archaeologist Patrick McGovern
believes, humans stopped at nothing in their pursuit of frequent
intoxication.

A secure supply of alcohol appears to have been part of the human
community's basic requirements much earlier than was long believed. As
early as around 9,000 years ago, long before the invention of the
wheel, inhabitants of the Neolithic village Jiahu in China were
brewing a type of mead with an alcohol content of 10 percent, McGovern
discovered recently.

McGovern analyzed clay shards found during excavations in China's
Yellow River Valley at his Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for
Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of
Pennsylvania Museum.

The bearded archaeologist is recognized around the world as an expert
when it comes to identifying traces of alcoholic drinks on prehistoric
finds. He ran so-called liquid chromatography coupled with mass
spectrometry on the clay remnants from Asia and found traces of
tartaric acid -- one of the main acids present in wine -- and beeswax
in the shards' pores. It appears that prehistoric humans in China
combined fruit and honey into an intoxicating brew.

Clever Survival Strategy

Additionally, plant sterols point to wild rice as an ingredient.
Lacking any knowledge of chemistry, prehistoric humans eager for the
intoxicating effects of alcohol apparently mixed clumps of rice with
saliva in their mouths to break down the starches in the grain and
convert them into malt sugar.

These pioneering brewers would then spit the chewed up rice into their
brew. Husks and yeasty foam floated on top of the liquid, so they used
long straws to drink from narrow necked jugs. Alcohol is still
consumed this way in some regions of China.

McGovern sees this early fermentation process as a clever survival
strategy. "Consuming high energy sugar and alcohol was a fabulous
solution for surviving in a hostile environment with few natural
resources," he explains.

The most recent finds from China are consistent with McGovern's chain
of evidence, which suggests that the craft of making alcohol spread
rapidly to various locations around the world during the Neolithic
period. Shamans and village alchemists mixed fruit, herbs, spices, and
grains together in pots until they formed a drinkable concoction.

But that wasn't enough for McGovern. He carried the theory much
further, aiming at a complete reinterpretation of humanity's history.
His bold thesis, which he lays out in his book "Uncorking the Past.
The Quest for Wine, Beer and Other Alcoholic Beverage," states that
agriculture -- and with it the entire Neolithic Revolution, which
began about 11,000 years ago -- are ultimately results of the
irrepressible impulse toward drinking and intoxication.

"Available evidence suggests that our ancestors in Asia, Mexico, and
Africa cultivated wheat, rice, corn, barley, and millet primarily for
the purpose of producing alcoholic beverages," McGovern explains.
While they were at it, he believes, drink-loving early civilizations
managed to ensure their basic survival.

A Hybrid Swill

Archaeologists have long pondered the question of which came first,
bread or beer. McGovern surmises that these prehistoric humans didn't
initially have the ability to master the very complicated process of
brewing beer. However, they were even more incapable of baking bread,
for which wild grains are extremely unsuitable. They would have had
first to separate the tiny grains from the chaff, with a yield hardly
worth the great effort. If anything, the earliest bakers probably made
nothing more than a barely palatable type of rough bread, containing
the unwanted addition of the grain's many husks.

It's likely, therefore, that early farmers first enriched their diet
with a hybrid swill -- half fruit wine and half mead -- that was
actually quite nutritious. Neolithic drinkers were devoted to this
precious liquid. At the excavation site of Hajji Firuz Tepe in the
Zagros Mountains of northwestern Iran, McGovern discovered prehistoric
wine racks used to store airtight carafes. Inhabitants of the village
seasoned their alcohol with resin from Atlantic Pistachio trees. This
ingredient was said to have healing properties, for example for
infections, and was used as an early antibiotic.

The village's Neolithic residents lived comfortably in spacious mud
brick huts, and the archaeologist and his team found remnants of wine
vessels in the kitchens of nearly all the dwellings. "Drinking wasn't
just a privilege of the wealthy in the village," McGovern posits, and
he adds that women drank their fair share as well.

A Mysterious Inscription?

In Iran of all countries, where alcohol consumption is now punishable
by whipping, the American scientist found vessels containing the first
evidence of prehistoric beer. At first he puzzled over the purpose of
the bulbous vessels with wide openings found in the prehistoric
settlement Godin Tepe. Previously known wine vessels all had smaller
spouts.

McGovern was also perplexed by crisscrossed grooves scratched into the
bottoms of the containers. Could it be some kind of mysterious
inscription?

But back in the laboratory, he isolated calcium oxalate, known to
brewers as an unwanted byproduct of beer production. Nowadays,
breweries can filter the crystals out of their brew without any
difficulty. Their resourceful predecessors, working 3,500 years B.C.,
scratched grooves into their 50-liter (13-gallon) jugs so that the
tiny stones would settle out there. McGovern had discovered
humankind's first beer bottles.

The ancient farmers in Godin Tepe harvested barley from fields near
the village and mashed the crop using basalt stone. Then they brewed
the ground grain into a considerable range of varieties, enjoying a
sweet, caramel-flavored dark beer, an amber-hued lager-like
concoction, and other pleasant-tasting beverages.

Around the same time, the Sumerians were paying homage to their
fertility goddess Nin-Harra, whom they considered to be the inventor
of beer. The creators of Mesopotamian civilization scratched
instructions for brewing beer onto small clay tablets in Nin-Harra's
honor. The main ingredient in their variety of beer was emmer, a
variety of wheat that has since nearly disappeared.

Thus the human project that started with the first hominids to stumble
around under fruit trees reached completion with these prehistoric
beer drinkers. "Moderate alcohol consumption was advantageous for our
early ancestors," McGovern speculates, "and they adapted to it
biologically."

It is a legacy that still burdens humankind today. The archaeologist,
however, sees himself as reasonably balanced in this respect.
Ancestors on one side of his family, the McGoverns, opened the very
first bar in their hometown of Mitchell, South Dakota. On the other
side, however, an especially puritanical branch of the family
originated from Norway and strictly avoided alcohol consumption.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0%2C1518%2C668642%2C00.html