Evidence
of alcoholic beverages goes back at least 9,000 years, and we may
eventually find evidence even older. Even before that, our primate
ancestors were attracted to fermented fruit for its good qualities:
calories, easy digestion, and the good feeling it gave them. Historians
once considered alcohol as just another consumable, but it's becoming
more clear that alcohol was one of the driving forces behind a lot of
developments and upheavals of human civilization.
Indirectly,
we may have the nutritional benefits of beer to thank for the invention
of writing, and some of the world’s earliest cities—for the dawn of
history, in other words. Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at
Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at
Tall Bazi, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain
made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing
from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. “They had bread and
barley porridge, plus maybe some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very
bad,” she says. “But as soon as you have beer, you have everything you
need to develop really well. I’m convinced this is why the first high
culture arose in the Near East.”
Alcohol had a big role in the rise of agriculture and communities, then trade, then war. Read
what we we know about the role of alcohol in human history at National Geographic.
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