Who Invented Alcohol?

When did humans start making alcohol?

Alcohol disappears. What remained, after thousands of years, were traces of the work: starch in a stone mortar, acids soaked into the wall of a jar, plant remains, the polish left by a pestle. The story of early drinking is a story of those objects.

A cave on Mount Carmel, about 13,000 years ago

Raqefet Cave looks west from the limestone of Mount Carmel, in what is now Israel. In the Late Natufian period—roughly 13,700 to 11,700 years ago—the people who used it were hunter-gatherers living on the threshold of agriculture. They did not farm. They did bury their dead here, again and again, in a small area of the first chamber. About thirty people were laid in the rock. Some of the graves were lined with flowering plants.[6] Butchered animal bones went in with them.[5]

Around the burials, more than a hundred hollows had been cut into the cave floor and terrace—mortars and cupmarks hammered into the bedrock. Two deep boulder mortars stood next to human remains. One is about 33 centimetres deep, with a hole at the base. A third mortar, bowl-shaped, sits among the features in the middle of the floor: 18 centimetres deep, 27 centimetres across the rim.[1]

Li Liu, Jiajing Wang and colleagues sampled the three mortars for microscopic plant remains and for the wear on the stone. They found starches from wheat or barley, oats, legumes, sedge tubers and other plants. Control scrapings from unused surfaces and from soil outside the cave were almost empty. Some of the cereal starches looked like malted barley under the microscope. Others, from the bowl-shaped mortar, matched the pattern the same team produced when they mashed and fermented grain in experiments.[1]

The deep mortars are worn as if fibre baskets had been moved up and down inside them. The bowl-shaped mortar is worn as if it had been pounded with a wooden pestle. Liu’s reconstruction is the three-stage sequence later brewers would recognise: grain sprouted and dried (malting), crushed and warmed in water (mashing), then left for yeast to work (fermenting). The team’s reading is that the bowl mortar was used both to pound plant foods and to brew a wheat- or barley-based drink, probably with other plants added, and that the drink was likely low in alcohol.[1]

Jars in Henan, about 9,000 years ago

A different kind of trace appears several thousand years later, and thousands of kilometres away. At Jiahu, an early Neolithic village in Henan in China, Patrick McGovern and colleagues extracted the organic residues soaked into sixteen pottery vessels: narrow-mouthed storage jars, jars with high flaring necks, perforated basins. Most of the samples came from the bases, where liquids linger. Thirteen of the sixteen were chemically similar to one another. The vessels date from about 9,000 to 7,500 years ago.[2]

The alcohol itself was long gone. Ethanol evaporates; microbes finish what time begins. What the chemistry found was a recipe. Matches pointed toward rice, and rice is the only cereal recovered at the site. Long-chain hydrocarbons typical of beeswax pointed toward honey. Tartaric acid pointed toward fruit. In the Near East that acid is a strong sign of grape. In China it need not be. Hawthorn fruit holds about four times as much tartaric acid as grape, and both hawthorn seeds and wild grape seeds have been found at Jiahu. McGovern’s conclusion is a mixed fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit—hawthorn, grape, or both.[2]

Fermentation is inferred rather than bottled. The yeast that makes wine, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, lives in honey and on the skins of sweet fruit. Dilute the honey, crush the fruit, wait a few warm days, and the work begins by itself. The people of Jiahu, McGovern argues, had learned to put that process into jars.

Jiahu is not a sequel to Raqefet. It is evidence that sophisticated fermentation was being practised independently, far from the Near East, by about 9,000 years ago. There was probably no single invention of alcohol, and no capital city of drinking. Different populations discovered the same microbial accident and began to repeat it.

By the early Neolithic, and possibly several millennia earlier, humans were no longer only stumbling on fermented fruit. They were learning to make it happen again.

What were the first alcoholic drinks?

Modern drinkers think in categories: beer, wine, cider, mead. Prehistoric people did not have to. Early fermented beverages were probably hybrids of whatever would ferment. Standardised recipes come later.

Cereals are a different problem from fruit and honey. Fruit and honey already contain accessible sugars. Grain is mostly starch. To make that starch useful, people have to do something to it: roast it, grind it, soak it, cook it as porridge, malt it, ferment it. Bread is one way of exploiting cereals. It is not the only way.

Beer before bread?

In 1953 the archaeologist Robert Braidwood put a mischievous question to his colleagues: did people once live by beer alone? Might the thirst for a fermented cereal drink, rather than the need for bread, have pushed humans toward cultivating grain?[8] The question has never quite gone away, because it is a good story. Raqefet appears to put cereal fermentation among hunter-gatherers, before domesticated cereals in the Near East. That unsettles a tidy sequence:

agriculture → surplus grain → bread → beer

What the mortars actually show is less cinematic and more useful. The same stones that carried malt-like cereal starches also carried oats, legumes and sedge tubers. Liu’s team sees brewing as one among several ways Natufians were already working grain, and as a possible motive, in part, for beginning to cultivate cereals in the southern Levant.[1] At Shubayqa 1 in eastern Jordan, another Natufian site, charred remains have been identified as bread, about 14,400 years old.[7] Brewing and baking, on present evidence, belong to the same world of cereal experimentation. The romantic version—that agriculture was invented in order to make beer—goes further than either site can take us. The interesting version is already on the table: foragers were playing with grain in several ways, brewing among them, before the first fields.

A jar the size of a person, about 8,000 years ago

Move forward roughly another millennium, into the valleys of the South Caucasus. At the early Neolithic villages of Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora in Georgia, people were making some of the earliest large pottery in the Near East. One reconstructed jar from nearby Khramis Didi-Gora is nearly a metre tall and a metre wide. It would have held more than 300 litres. McGovern, working with a large Georgian and international team, sampled the clay of similar jars. Several sherds contained far more tartaric acid—the main organic acid in grapes—than the soil around them, along with the other acids that travel with grape.[3]

The plants agree, as far as plants can. Grape pollen is present in the Neolithic layers and absent from the modern topsoil. Starch and fragments of grapevine skin were found with a jar of similar type. Fruit flies, which come to sugar and to alcohol, turned up in one sherd. Grapevines seem to have been growing near the villages, perhaps inside them. From that combination of chemistry and plants, the team’s conclusion is grape wine, made and stored in those outsized jars.[3]

This is the first drink in the story a modern drinker might recognise without a lecture. Not rice and honey and hawthorn. Grapes, in quantity, in a vessel built to hold them. The contrast with Jiahu is not a ladder from mixed drinks to beer to wine. These are different regions, different ingredients, different millennia. What they share is increasing control. People had gone from noticing fermentation to beginning to steer it.

Why did prehistoric humans drink?

We don’t know. Nobody wrote it down. A residue can suggest what was in a vessel. It cannot say why somebody raised it. Archaeologists therefore read the room: a house, a graveyard, a hill where people gathered to build something enormous.

Drinking with the dead

In four graves at Raqefet the dead were laid on a thin mud lining that still holds the impressions of stems, including sage—colour and scent placed under the body. In one grave the bedrock itself had been chiselled to shape before the lining went in. One skeleton was found resting on the rim of a large bedrock mortar.[6]

The animal bones in the main burial hollow are the leftovers of meals: butchered, eaten, not whole carcasses offered as grave goods. They do not show the trampling, burning and gnawing that pile up when people live on their rubbish for a long time. Reuven Yeshurun, Guy Bar-Oz and Dani Nadel read them as the remains of short, punctuated events: funerary feasts, gathered and buried with the dead.[5]

The brewing traces sit inside that scene. Two of the analysed mortars stood next to human remains. The picture is a cemetery, a meal, and—if Liu is right—a fermented cereal drink. Liu’s argument is that the drink belonged to the mortuary rites: something done for the dead, and for the living who had to go on as a group.[1] The flowers and the bones are in the graves whether or not the starches are beer. The starches become a funeral drink because of where the mortars stood.

A hill of pillars

Göbekli Tepe, on a rise in south-eastern Turkey, is where the same question becomes almost too large.

This was not a village. The excavators read it as a sanctuary. Hunter-gatherers set circles of T-shaped limestone pillars around two taller stones at the centre—carved with animals, and sometimes with arms and belts, so that they read as stylised human beings. The central pair in one enclosure stands about 5.5 metres high. There are no domesticated plants or animals. The people who built this still hunted and gathered.[4]

What they left in the fill is not domestic clutter. There is an unusual quantity of smashed bone—gazelle, aurochs, wild ass—far more than contemporary settlements usually yield. Oliver Dietrich and colleagues see a work feast: come from a wider area, eat, and raise the stone. Benches run around the circles, as if the architecture itself expected a gathering.[4]

In later rooms sit six limestone troughs and barrels, some of them able to hold 160 litres. Grey-black residues cling to the lower walls. Whether beer was on the menu is the weaker part of the case. Tests looked for oxalate, a salt that can form when grain is mashed. Dietrich’s suggestion is that a fermented cereal drink may have been prepared or served at the gatherings, perhaps from grain malted elsewhere and brought in for the occasion.[4] If it was there, it would have been one element in a much larger social machine.

That machine is the reason Göbekli Tepe belongs in a history of drinking at all. Feasts gather people. A host who feeds a crowd creates a debt. Shared ritual marks who is in the group. A feast can also be wages in advance. One way to write the chain is:

feast → social bonds → cooperation → collective labour → monumental construction

Alcohol, in this reconstruction, is a possible lubricant, not the engine. Dietrich and colleagues return to Braidwood’s old question and refuse the slogan. People did not live by beer alone. Fermented drinks may still have played a part in one of the moments when human groups became large enough, and organised enough, to raise a hill of pillars before they raised a harvest.

Not: alcohol created the Neolithic. Rather: fermented beverages may already have belonged to the feasts in which larger groups learned to cooperate.

Alcohol before civilisation

So: no inventor. Possible brewing among foragers about 13,000 years ago, from mortars in a cemetery. A mixed fermented drink in China about 9,000 years ago, from the chemistry of jars. Something close to grape wine in Georgia about 8,000 years ago, in vessels the size of a person. Parallel experiments, not a single origin, and not yet the drinks we name in a bar.

Why remains the hardest part. The places that preserve early traces of alcohol also preserve graves, meals and gathering architecture. Researchers have therefore looked for meaning in ritual, funerary practice, feasting and social bonds. That is where the evidence points. It is also where evidence thins into argument.

Then the nature of the record changes.

In Mesopotamia we do not have only microscopic residues and the layout of a site. People begin to write about beer.