Beer Is So Great, It Made Humans Settle Down To Grow More Wheat

Synthesizing dozens of studies on an ancient culture which is widely believed to be the cradle of agriculture, three researchers from Simon Fraser University say they found evidence that beer was a major driver of the crucial development towards large scale cereal cultivation. The ancient Natufian culture that was subject of the research is known to have occupied a region just east of the Mediterranean Sea in what we now call the Middle East about 13,000 to 9,800 years ago.

It was there that pre-historic humans, after moving out of Africa, shifted from living in hunter-gatherer, nomadic societies to sedentary communities which grew crops, including the cereal grains which are essential to beer making.

The scientists use the existing knowledge about the ancient culture and social life there, unearthed by decades of archeological work done by thousands of dedicated people around the world, to concluded that "feasting and brewing very likely provided a key link between increasing 'complexity' and the adoption of cereal cultivation," in these early societies. This is opposed to an absolute proof for a love of beer that drove the nomadic people to settle, that could have been provided by "brewery" artefacts showing a production capacity -- similar to the extreme amounts of amphores found in Southern France and other territories that uncovered the vast vine export business of the Roman Empire that was subsequently discovered to be one of the major economic drivers of the largest and longest enduring empire ever created.

Brian Hayden, the study's lead author, said to the Ottawa Citizen that brewing beer was just part of the picture during humanity's great shift from nomadic to stable communities but that it was "important in making feasts such powerful tools for attracting people and getting them committed to producing surpluses."

The researchers, looking at the extent of the production and available food alternatives, assert that "the domestication of cereals was for the purposes of brewing beer rather than for basic subsistence purposes."

Beer brewed at that time was very different though from what we know as beer today.

"Beers made in traditional tribal or village societies generally are quite different from modern industrial beers," the paper states. "Traditional beers often have quite low alcohol contents (two to four per cent), include lactic acid fermentation giving them a tangy and sour taste, contain various additives such as honey or fruits, and vary in viscosity, from clear liquids to soupy mixtures with suspended solids to pastes."