Possibly so, according to this archaeology professor from the University of Pennsylvania.
Human beings transitioned gradually from hunter-gatherers, or people who wandered around picking up whatever was laying around to eat and occasionally procuring their own food. This group is also sometimes called "teenagers." Over time, they developed agriculture, wherein they grew their food and stayed in one place. Agriculture is a more efficient method of producing food and it supported more people, so folks began to gather around each other more, leading to cities.
Dr. Patrick McGovern -- whose name gives us a clue to his heritage and that may or may not play a role in his discovery and theories -- says that the first folks who settled down in one area to grow plants may not have done so in order to grow plants they could eat. Cooking technology was such that not enough food would be prepared that way to require more plants than could be gathered during the usual nomadic or semi-nomadic wanderings. In other words, baking bread didn't produce such a great product that people said, "Hey, we ought to stop wandering around gathering up wheat to bake this stuff, because if we stayed in one place and grew it ourselves we could have lots more of it!"
No, Dr. McGovern says -- somehow or another they had learned that grains, mixed with moisture, did something that made drinking the resulting product a whole lot more interesting than drinking plain water (It also made all of the members of the opposite sex more attractive, which could be another reason for the population boom. Which means the concept known as "beer goggles" may have developed long before we had the terminology to describe it.) The demand for this product was such that people settled down to be able to grow enough grain to meet it, and voila! Civilization!
Dr. McGovern's earliest samples are from pottery found in China that dates to 7000 BC. The method by which our ancient ancestors added moisture to the grain is not particularly pleasant to describe, but I will say that along with beer goggles, "backwash" is also a modern concept that has very old roots.
In an interesting twist, it seems that many modern-day alcohol consumers have reversed the civilizing process suggested by Dr. McGovern. Rather than staying in one place, they will often wander a familiar circuit, stopping at several different places to see and gather what alcoholic beverage they can find before moving on to the next. This group is sometimes known as "college students on spring break."
(H/T Arts and Letters Daily)
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