Alcohol's Neolithic origins
Humankind's first encounters with alcohol in the form of fermented
fruit probably occurred in just 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, 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. It appears that prehistoric humans in China
combined fruit and honey into an intoxicating brew. 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. But that wasn't enough for
McGovern. He carried the theory much further. 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. According to McGovern,
prehistoric humans didn't initially have the ability to master the
very complicated process of brewing beer. It's likely 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. In Iran 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 BCE, scratched grooves into their 50-liter (13-
gallon) jugs so that the tiny stones would settle out there.
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 main
ingredient in their variety of beer was emmer, a variety of wheat that
has since nearly disappeared. "Moderate alcohol consumption was
advantageous for our early ancestors," McGovern speculates, "and they
adapted to it biologically."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,668642,00.html |
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