"Did Man Once Live by Beer Alone?" Redux

A scholarly debate in 1953 asked "Did Man Once Live by Beer Alone?" and suggested that selectively picking plants for beer led to the origin of agriculture in the Near East "cradle of civilization." The scholarly consensus was that the cultivation of grain for food preceded the use of grain for brewing because of a variety of technical reasons involved in the making of beer. In light of the discovery of evidence of brewing 13,000 years ago in a Jordan cave, the argument is being revisited. It’s important to keep in mind that history is not a series of linear causes and effects—no one thing caused another one thing. What is suggested is that brewing was among the critical elements that led to agriculture. In other words, what evolved into the custom of a drink at the end of the day was essential to what many contend was the greatest advance of civilization.

For those of us who have lived enough years, there is a reflexive response to this thesis. We have known men, women, marriages, and families destroyed or, at least, set back by alcoholism. The drink at the end of the day migrates to the afternoon, then to the morning. How can something with such disastrous effects be an underpinning of advanced societies? Wouldn’t we be more advanced if we didn’t spend so much time tippling? There is a strong correlation between alcohol consumption and poverty, and an even stronger one when you replace “poverty” in the equation with “violence.” Yet all such data supports the allure of the drink. We don’t change as individuals or societies unless with strong motivation. Among the greater changes of humankind was the shift to agriculture.

“I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”

― Charles Bukowski

Why would anyone stop being a hunter-gatherer? This lifestyle had worked for hominids for millions of years. I don’t buy the idea that agriculture provided a more stable food source. In floods or droughts, a farmer can’t pick up his crops and move elsewhere. A hunter-gatherer can simply walk away from scarcity. There might be some advantage in that grain can be stored. However, meat can be dried and provides more calories per mouthful than gruel or bread. And if you add to hunter-gatherer the occupation of herder, your four-footed larders travel with you.

Physically, there is no advantage to agriculture. In comparison to hunter-gatherers, farmers had worse teeth, less dense bones, smaller stature, and were more prone to disease.

Farming is labor-intensive. Hunter-gatherers work between 20 and 40 hours a week, much of it is social. Peter Gray Ph.D. writes “hunter-gatherers use play and humor to maintain a social and economic system founded on principles of sharing, cooperation, individual autonomy, and equality; and how playfulness runs through hunter-gatherers' religious beliefs and practices in ways that support their egalitarian approach to life.”

Not to speak of the difference between a steak and gruel.

Who wouldn’t prefer the excitement and challenge of hunting to the tedious long hours involved in tending a field? We needed a good reason to settle down.

The first social drinking likely occurred in religious rituals and the oldest monumental ruins such as Gobekli Tepe in Turkey were places of worship. There, archeologists recovered giant stone troughs erected 10,000 years old. At the bottom of these vessels, they found traces of the chemical calcium oxalate, typically produced during the soaking, mashing, and fermenting of grain—a by-product of brewing. The first cultivation of grain started in the same neighborhood around the same time Gobeki Tepe was an active place of worship. Additionally, the sort of grain cultivated in the area, einkorn, makes poor bread, but excellent beer.

In an ancient Babylonian religious text, Kubaba a female tavern keeper was entrusted with sovereignty over the whole world.

In the epic Gilgamesh, the hero meets the female tavern-keeper Siduri in the Underworld in his quest for immortality. She gives Gilgamesh, a powerful god-king, sage advice about the nature of human life, how short it is, and how one ought to enjoy it.

The centrality of alcohol is also shown by the fact that many of the oldest businesses in existence today are taverns and breweries. We are a sociable animal and alcohol lubricates our sociability when it doesn’t sabotage it. Alcohol alters the mood—gives the drinker a different perspective from the everyday grind. Interrupts the routine. It lowers inhibitions for better or worse.

Robin Dunbar of Oxford says, “Studies clearly show that there are social and wellbeing benefits to be derived directly from drinking alcohol, especially in relaxed social environments.” Both alcohol and good company release endorphins so they naturally go together. According to the Psychedelics Encyclopedia, only the Eskimos and a few Polynesian societies don’t have mind-altering substances. Alcohol is the most common perhaps because it is the easiest to produce in large quantities.

For a tavern, you need five things—alcohol, a place, a means of distributing i.e. jars to store and cups for use, a medium of exchange, and a society that allows specialization. I can’t imagine barter working in the setting of the tavern. The keeper would end up with a lot of whatever there was an excess of. The shekel and other coinage came into use 5000 years ago. Doubtless, it facilitated trade, but it also paid for the drink.

In the American frontier whisky was a medium of exchange. It was bulky but improved with age.

Then there is the issue that alcohol makes water potable. Children in the American colonies drank small beer which was healthier than the water tainted by human and animal waste.

As Benjamin Franklin said: “In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.”

Was it worth it? Depends on the individual. Something is consoling for many about the drink at the end of the day. We relax. We begin to talk to our fellows. Our problems are obscured by the alcoholic mists. Endorphins flow. Inhibitions dissipate. We forget about tomorrow.

“I like to have a martini,

Two at the very most.

After three I'm under the table,

after four I'm under my host.”

― Dorothy Parker

Perhaps alcohol needed to be dangerously seductive and addictive. Nothing less would tempt us to change our ways and become civilized if that is what you can call us.