Whatever you cook this holiday season, chances are you didn't have to kill it yourself or get it from the wild. For that, you can thank your ancestors, who, about 10,000 years ago, carried out one of humanity's most dramatic transformations: they began to move away from their traditional hunting-and-gathering lifestyle and became farmers.
Why this happened remains a mystery, given that our species has successfully survived for approximately 300,000 years without the need to reap and sow, let alone milk, shear, and shepherd. Many ideas have been put forward as possible explanations. Perhaps agriculture was a more reliable source of food. This may have allowed people to be less dependent on their neighbors. Perhaps it was about wanting to stay in the same place, perhaps because a certain place had religious significance or loved ones were buried there.
Or was it more about crashing with your friends? It may seem funny, but then, as now, alcohol would go beyond being a source of pleasure (hangovers notwithstanding) and becoming a means of social connection. We know Networking has played a critical role in human successand if you want to regularly lubricate this relationship with beer or other alcoholic beverages, you need a reliable supply of grains. So, our ancestors turned their lives upside down to drink?
Anthropologists were thinking about this possibility since the 1950s. However, at that time they did not have the technology to test this idea. The challenge is to differentiate between beer and bread, which many believe is a more likely candidate for agricultural development. According to archaeological evidence, bread baking and brewing seem similar in appearance. Jiajing Wang at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Both methods involve grinding the grains and mixing them with water, leaving behind a starchy residue. Researchers needed a way to distinguish beer starch from bread starch. They also had to determine which of them was older.
As a result, several archaeologists, including Wang, have spent years on what may seem like a quixotic endeavor: finding evidence of an ancient alcoholic drink.
A good starting point was later sedentary societies such as Ancient Egypt, where brewing was clearly evident. Egyptian archaeological sites often contain distinctive ceramic jars. “They literally just call it a 'beer can,'” says Wang, because its shape resembles a fermentation tank. Over the past few years, she and her colleagues have confirmed that they were used to prepare and store alcohol by identifying the distinctive microscopic remains preserved inside. In Hierakonpolis in southern Egypt.For example, they found fragments of beer cans containing cereal starch granules, yeast cells and calcium oxalate crystals, or “beerstone.” They showed that people brewed beer there from a mixture of wheat, barley and grass between 5800 and 5600 years ago – more than 2000 years before the first pharaoh of a united Egypt.
Rice spirit pot from Qiaotou, Zhejiang Province, southern China, estimated to be between 8,700 and 9,000 years old.
Jiajing Wang
“These people were producing beer at a very industrial level,” Wang says. However, these early drinks were not like modern ales or lagers. “They sprouted the grains, cooked them, and then used wild yeast to convert some of the sugar into alcohol,” she says. The result was not a clear liquid, but a “sweet, slightly fermented porridge.”
Such discoveries have provided the basis for evidence that can demonstrate prehistoric beer production. The next challenge was to find out how far back in time such evidence could be found.
In 2016 Li Liu At Stanford University in California, Wang and colleagues described a site called Mijiaya in northern China where ceramic vessels were discovered. traces of brewing 5000 years ago. The Mijiay people used an unusual mixture of plants for their beer: millet, another type of millet called Job's tears, barley and tubers. Five years later, Wang and Liu described equally ancient evidence of drunkenness. at the Xipo training ground near the city of Xi'an in northern Chinawhich contains artifacts from the Yangshao culture. Rice and millet were fermented in large vats using a red mold called Monasquewhich is still used to make fermented foods such as rice wine, as part of a starter called What. They suggested that elite people drank beer during “competitive feasts.”
The oldest alcoholic drink
However, the oldest evidence is from the Shanshan culture in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River in southern China. Discovered by Liu and her colleagues two decades ago, it is one of the earliest farming societies, dating from approximately 10,000 to 8,500 years ago. In 2021, the team led by Wang described Shanshan city called Qiaotouwhose age ranges from 8700 to 9000 years. This is an embankment several meters high, surrounded by a moat. There are no houses on the mound. Instead, it is dotted with burials, accompanied by red-painted pottery. The people of Shanshan were “remarkable, highly skilled potters,” Wang says. On the pottery, the team found traces of rice, Job's tears and unidentified tuber-like growths that were used to brew beer. Rice beer may have been consumed during wakes or buried with the dead, she said.
Then, a year ago, Liu and her colleagues described oldest evidence of brewing in East Asia to date. Her team examined 12 pottery shards from the deepest layer of the original Shanshan site, which is between 9,000 and 10,000 years old. “This represents the earliest stage of Shanshan culture,” she says. The fragments contained traces of rice, other grains such as Job's tears, acorns and lilies, as well as the remains of What starter containing Monasque and yeast.
At that time, “domestication was already underway,” Liu says, and apparently so was brewing. All this is consistent with beer being a major factor in domestication. “Alcohol production is oversupplied because we have a surplus of grains,” she says.
Compatible, but unfortunately not proof. Because it turns out that the oldest bread appeared long before Shanshan beer – and indeed, the advent of agriculture. At Shubaik 1 in Jordan, archaeologists have found evidence of “bakery products“from 11,600 to 14,600 years ago. The people who baked this early bread were the Natufians, who are known to often settle in one place for long periods of time. However, they obtained almost all their food by hunting and gathering.
Rice terraces in Guangxi Province, China.
Sebastien Lecoq/Alamy Stock Photo
To further complicate matters, these hunter-gatherers also appear to have brewed beer. The Rakefet Cave in Israel was a Natufian burial site where approximately 30 bodies were buried. Liu, Wang and their colleagues are there. found three stone mortars which was filled with a variety of wild plants, including wheat, barley and legumes, and then left to ferment, resulting in a porridge-like beer. The vessels date back to between 11,700 and 13,700 years ago – evidence that brewing also predates agriculture.
The question of which came first, beer or bread, remains unresolved. “We still don't have hard evidence to answer this question,” Liu says. Likewise, it's unclear whether beer, bread—or anything else—was the primary motive behind the agricultural revolution that ultimately provided the food and drink on your holiday table.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were both motives,” Wang says. After all, history is never simple: why should the backstory be any different?
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