Beer Before Bread
How Neolithic, alcohol-fueled raves gave rise to civilization
We have traditionally been told that the discovery of alcohol was an accidental by-product of agriculture. Once early farmers were systematically producing crops, they’d often end up with surpluses. These could be stored for the off-season, or as insurance against a future bad harvest. At some point, though, people noticed that if they left grain mashed up in water (say, as a result of an abandoned bread-making effort), the mixture would transform into something entirely different. It was not unpleasant smelling. It tasted a bit funny, but you got used to the flavor and even came to like it. Best of all, it could get you high. So, the story goes, sometime after mastering farming, humans also began to enjoy the benefits of beer, with similar processes around the world leading to grape, millet, rice, and maize-based alcoholic drinks. People finally had something tasty to pair with their bread and cheese. This is the standard account of the origin of alcohol production — that it’s an accident, an unintended consequence of the invention of agriculture.
Around the 1950s, though, this story began to be questioned by proponents of various “beer before bread” theories. They pointed out that large-scale, likely alcohol-fueled feasting, which often brought together people from far-flung regions for days of music, dancing, rituals, drinking, and sacrifices, began well before settled agriculture. At Göbekli Tepe, a site in what is now modern-day Turkey, hunter-gatherers convened regularly throughout the tenth to eighth millennia BCE to feast on gazelles, build circular structures, and erect enormous T-shaped limestone pillars carved with mysterious pictograms and animal forms — probably all while well-lubricated with beer. This is despite the fact that, practically speaking, getting drunk seems like a bad thing to combine with the construction of monumental architecture.
And yet, across the ancient world, we see similar evidence that the first large gatherings of people, centered on feasting, ritual, and booze, happened long before anyone had come up with the idea of planting and harvesting crops. Archaeologists working in the Fertile Crescent have noted that at the earliest known sites the particular tools being used and varieties of grain being grown were more suited to making beer than bread. One recent discovery found evidence of beer-making by the Natufian people around 13,000 years ago, predating the emergence of agriculture by at least 3,000 years. Given that bread was still millennia away from becoming a dietary staple, the most likely motivation for these hunter gathers to hunker down and get to work was to produce the starring liquid ingredient of communal feasts and ecstatic religious rituals. It is also worth noting that the world’s oldest extant recipe is for beer — part of an early Sumerian myth — and that our earliest representations of group feasting include obvious depictions of alcohol swilling. The human mastery of fermentation into alcohol is so ancient that certain yeast strains associated with wine and sake show evidence of having been domesticated 12,000 years ago or more.
We see the same pattern of alcohol production preceding agriculture in other parts of the world. A primitive ancestor of maize called teosinte was cultivated in Central and South America almost 9,000 years ago, well before farmers managed to produce proper maize. Teosinte makes terrible corn flour but excellent booze; it’s the basis for chicha, the beer-like beverage still drunk throughout Central and South America. The same is likely true of the drugs that took alcohol’s place in areas that lacked it. In an echo of the beer before bread argument, some scholars have pointed to evidence that, in Australia, the desire to cultivate the ingredients for the intoxicant pituri drove the development of agriculture in certain regions. Similarly, it is possible that the cultivation of tobacco in North and South America, especially in regions outside its native range, inspired the manipulation of other plant species and thereby the beginnings of agriculture.
All of this suggests that it is quite likely that the desire to get drunk or high gave rise to agriculture, rather than the other way around. Agriculture, of course, is the foundation of civilization. This means that our taste for liquid or smokable neurotoxins, the convenient means for taking the PFC offline, may have been the catalyst for settled agricultural life. Moreover, intoxicants not only lured us into civilization but also helped make it possible for us to become civilized. By causing humans to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal — to live like social insects, despite our ape nature — intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups, domesticate increasing numbers of plants and animals, accumulate new technologies, and thereby create the sprawling civilizations that have made us the dominate mega-fauna on the planet.
In other words, it is Dionysus, with his skinful of wine and his seductive panpipes, who is the founder of civilization; Apollo just came along for the ride.
Excerpted from Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (Little, Brown Spark 2021)
