While more than 50.000 years ago people lived as hunter-gatherers, at this time of the year they drank, at best, tea made from leaves and roots. At that time, man confidently controlled fire, made rudimentary dishes, and as a hunter-gatherer, his diet was dominated by plant foods. However, he did not eat cereal.
Wild grains, wheat, millet and barley were discovered by man in the fertile river plains about 30.000 years ago. We know this, because we find traces of grinding and cooking grains on various tools and in vessels from the period long before the agricultural revolution. A lot of new evidence suggests that he made not only bread but also beer from wild grain.
Possession of alcohol today (maybe?) does not represent an important advantage and help for survival and raising the quality of life. But imagine the life of an average hunter-gatherer, say a man in his twenties. He is a family man who lives in a temporary shelter, has a wife, one or even two children, parents, mother-in-law and father-in-law on the hump. As a man in full force, he walks around in summer and winter, with other men chasing deer, mammoths, wild boars, rabbits, birds… whatever he comes across. When there is nothing left to harvest, dig and catch, they pack the few things and move to the unknown. It depends on him whether the family will survive. When winter comes and only the frozen roots remain outside, he takes out pieces of dried meat, dried berries, dried apples, nuts and cereal grains from the winter storage. From these grains, although with a lot of effort, you can make bread or porridge that fills and warms the stomach.
TEAM FROM THE PIZZA
And so, it's the middle of winter, an icy wind is blowing outside and wild beasts are howling, and the neighboring tribe spends the evening making plans to rob our hero of what little food he has and maybe a female child. Wouldn't everything be nicer and easier if there was a little beer in the animal's stomach instead of water? Suddenly, a frightened and hungry group from the shelter with a little alcohol and carbohydrates could be transformed into a team of brave, ruddy, drowned and exhilarated people, ready to make any deal, but also to fight bitterly if necessary. Just like some merry crew from a beer hall.
But, no joke, researchers from various parts of the world dealing with late hunter-gatherers state that beer had an extremely important social role. It strengthened bonds between people, encouraged cooperation, gatherings, was part of rituals. In fact, beer may have been so important that it may have prompted people to figure out a way to get more grain. In support of this is the repeatedly confirmed thesis that man managed to survive and dominate the planet thanks to networking and cooperation.
It was very obvious to the hunter-gatherers that an ear of grain would grow from a single grain - they knew that in the place where the grain was spilled, shoots of new plants would soon appear. However, it took time to devise and implement a complex business: during the summer they would collect seeds of wild grains for eating, for winter storage and for sowing. Sowing could not be done anywhere - the land had to be prepared by lighting the vegetation at the right time and controlling the fire. And the hardest thing of all - man had to stay near his wheat field and protect it from animals and other people. This means that he was in the same place the whole year, a place where he had already picked every fruit, dug up every root, killed a huge number of animals. It remains to wait for the harvest.
And that's why the family gradually changes its habits: since they already sleep in the same place all the time, it makes sense to make a safer and warmer house - maybe near another, peaceful family of relatives. Animals can be caught, tamed and raised in an enclosure for cheese and meat. The entire area around houses and fields can be fenced off so that dangerous animals and people do not approach. In a safer environment, jobs could be more easily divided - grandmothers took care of the children, women worked around the house, and men went hunting, crafts and guarding the property.
There were challenges, many people in one place meant that infectious diseases spread quickly. The food is of poorer quality: compared to the varied diet of hunter-gatherers, cereals lacked vitamins and minerals, but provided energy and a sense of satiety. There was more free time, they could think long term, raise more children. However, in years when the crop would be scarce or the neighboring thief-savage tribe would steal all the grain supplies, everyone in the settlement would starve. The permanent settlement was a constant target, the man had nowhere to run, but only to defend himself. Domesticated wolves that have been with man for thousands of years are now real guardians.
Of course, the transition from nomadic to life in a settlement, changes in diet, social organization and hierarchy, domestication of animals... are processes that lasted for thousands of years, and not at the level of one family's life. We don't know too much about the motives. It could be concluded that agriculture was a more reliable source of food than hunting and gathering, that it allowed groups to remain independent. It is possible that they wanted to stay where their ancestors were buried. Perhaps they feared the uncertainty of moving. And maybe they just wanted to drink beer.
FIRST BREWERIES
The oldest finds of an ancient brewery were found among the Natufians, a tribe of the eastern Mediterranean. The Natufians are an important Late Stone Age culture in the fertile Levant (ca. 15.000–9.500 BC), and at the time when they "kept the brewery" about 13.000 years ago, they were a semi-sedentary people. That's why we consider them a people in transition between hunter-gatherers and farmers: although they lived as hunter-gatherers, whose settlements were scattered throughout today's Israel, Palestine, and even Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, they did not grow grains. They mastered the technology of making beer using wild, wild wheat.
In an article published in the "Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports" in 2018, a team of authors coming from Stanford, as well as from Israel, China and Poland, presented the conclusions of the research of the Rakafet cave in Israel, where the Natufians buried the dead, but also brewed beer. Stanford archeology professor Li Liu, who led the team, explained how the discovery indicates that alcohol-making was not necessarily the result of surplus agricultural production, but began for ritual reasons and spiritual needs, even before agriculture became common.
Breweries were common among early farmers and existed in various parts of the world. The ancient Shangshan culture (10.000 to 8.500 years ago), one of the first agricultural communities in what is now China, fermented rice to make beer. In the Huanghe Valley of the Yellow River, in an 11.000-year-old Neolithic village, remains of beer made from rice, fruit and honey were found in pottery. Steven Batiuk, a researcher from the University of Toronto, states that this beer was not like today's, calling it a "witch's drink". "It probably had a fairly high alcohol content," adds Batiuk, suggesting that the neoligans got drunk in order to talk to spirits in that state. About 5800 years ago, the Egyptians had vessels for beer fermentation, in which the remains of grain, yeast and beer dregs were found. But all this does not explain the researchers' new claim that farming may have been motivated by beer.
BIG FERMENTATION
It turns out that archaeologists solved a seemingly banal problem: during decades of Neolithic research, they found dishes with traces of starch and tools for crushing grain, but they did not always manage to determine exactly what the grain was made of - they assumed that it was bread, because baking bread and brewing beer in a Neolithic household 10.000 years ago left the same traces. Both involve grinding grains, mixing with water, and starchy residue on dishes. Jiajing Wang of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire explains how scientists have long sought a way to distinguish between beer starch and bread starch, and to determine which is older. In recent years, she says, they have been able to identify characteristic microscopic residues in vessels for cooking and storing alcohol, and thus distinguish a brewery from a bakery. In different locations around the planet, they discovered similar vessels of a specific shape that were used for beer fermentation. "Those people were making beer on a fairly industrial scale," says Professor Wang. "They germinated the grains, boiled them, and then used wild yeast to convert some of the sugar into alcohol." They received a sweet mash that was fermented and full of alcohol.
Jiajing Wang concludes that it cannot be determined with certainty whether beer or bread was made first, nor which of the two was the main reason for people to devote themselves to grain cultivation. "It wouldn't surprise me if both things were motivations," she says.
Although this thesis about beer that created civilization remains only a possibility and a humorous assumption, imagine for a moment that this time next year, thanks to the development of new methods of analysis of Neolithic archaeological remains, we irrefutably establish that the thesis is completely correct. Would we call the Neolithic the "great fermentation" instead of the agricultural revolution? Would we include the logistical problem of transporting large quantities of liquid among the motives for abandoning the nomadic life? Are the first villages created because beer is better in society? Is the village brewer an honorary chief?
