Alcohol and the seeds of agriculture

Most people assume that humans first domesticated grains for food -- but what if we first domesticated grains for drink?  Beer, specifically.  That's one suggestion of the new book by Patrick McGovern, Uncorking the Past.

Wild grains would have been time-intensive to harvest, difficult to process into an edible form, and would have been poor in nutrient quality relative to other available foods -- so why try?  McGovern suggests that grains may have been valued for purposes of intoxication first, and only later as a source of food.  Der Spiegel has the details:

"Archaeologists have long pondered the question of which came first, bread or beer. McGovern surmises that these prehistoric humans didn't initially have the ability to master the very complicated process of brewing beer. However, they were even more incapable of baking bread, for which wild grains are extremely unsuitable. They would have had first to separate the tiny grains from the chaff, with a yield hardly worth the great effort. If anything, the earliest bakers probably made nothing more than a barely palatable type of rough bread, containing the unwanted addition of the grain's many husks."

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"As early as around 9,000 years ago, long before the invention of the wheel, inhabitants of the Neolithic village Jiahu in China were brewing a type of mead with an alcohol content of 10 percent..."

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"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 is a bio-molecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania.  (That's a fancy name for Alcohol Studies.)  McGovern uses trace residues from pottery found at ancient archaeological sites to identify the ingredients.

Even better, McGovern and Dogfish Head Brewery teamed up to recreate some of the earliest alcoholic beverages ever discovered.  Dogfish Head now offers three beers as part of their Ancient Ales line.  Check out each beer's homepage for additional background.

Theobroma - Based on pottery fragments in Honduras from 1,200 BC, the earliest known example of using cocoa for human consumption.

Midas Touch - Based on ingredients found in the tomb of Kind Midas and an ancient Turkish recipe.

Chateau Jiahu - Based on jars found in a Neolithic village in China 9,000 years ago.

For a bit more background on the brewing story, try here.  

(Thanks to Christal for the pointer.)