More than 12,000 years ago, our ancestors had the brilliant idea of abandoning their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle to evolve towards agriculture. Thanks to them, we no longer need to go and kill the Christmas turkey with our bare hands. Behind this change, undoubtedly one of the most significant in human history, several gray areas still remain.
The phenomenon remains difficult to explain, especially when we consider that our species has successfully survived for almost 300,000 years without practicing agriculture or livestock. Why did our ancestors change the way they lived? Many hypotheses have been put forward to explain it. Some think they were looking for more reliable sources of food, others say it was probably a desire to stay in one place, for religious reasons for example.
Amazing prehistoric traces
“Or was it more about getting drunk with friends?”asks New Scientist. Even back then, alcohol was more than just a pleasure: it encouraged the creation of social bonds. Since the 1950s, anthropologists have speculated that the desire to produce beer played a role in the rise of agriculture, but they lacked the technical means to prove it. Since the traces of bread and beer were similar, it was difficult to distinguish their residues and identify which was the oldest.
Jiajing Wang, an archaeologist from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and his team spent many years trying to find traces of the oldest alcoholic beverage. Already in ancient Egypt, beer making was part of everyday life. In the south of the country, almost 6,000 years ago, people brewed a mixture of wheat, barley and herbs. “These people brewed beer on an almost industrial level”emphasizes Jiajing Wang.
Other evidence of brewing has also come to light in East Asia, where twelve fragments of pottery dating back 10,000 years have been discovered. At that time, sedentarization was already underway, which is consistent with the initial idea of the team of scientists but does not constitute irrefutable proof.
To complicate matters further, it turns out that these hunter-gatherers also brewed beer. Jiajing Wang and his colleagues found three stone mortars in the Raqefet Cave in Israel. Filled with various wild plants including wheat, barley and legumes, then left to ferment, these vessels produced a porridge-like beer. Brewing would therefore predate agriculture. Enough to confirm their hypothesis? Not necessarily, but Jiajing Wang and his team are on to something, and they intend to pursue it.
