The DU Lounge
Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsHow Beer Created Civilization!
What led early humans to begin cultivating grain some 10,000 years ago?
It was beer not bread a growing body of research shows.
Archaeologists have long hinted that Neolithic, or Stone Age, people first began growing and storing grain, like wheat and barley, to turn it into alcohol instead of flour for making bread. The hypothesis was recently revisited by writer Gloria Dawson in the science magazine Nautilus.
A botanist named Jonathan D. Sauer first posed the theory in the early 1950s. Sauer believed early farmers needed more incentive than just food to go through all the effort of planting and harvesting crops despite "the pitiful small return of grain." It was the discovery that "a mash of fermented grain yielded a palatable and nutritious beverage," he suggested, that "acted as a greater stimulant toward the experimental selection and breeding of the cereals than the discovery of flour and bread-making."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-beer-led-to-the-domestication-of-grain-2013-12#ixzz2onZaXMb
May I add: belch!
Wounded Bear
(58,685 posts)After all, there are no toxins in beer....well, other than the alcohol.
malthaussen
(17,215 posts)... it will tell you how beer saved civilization.
-- Mal