Some Say Nothing Good Comes From Alcohol, But 9,000-Year-Old Beer Shows Otherwise
Ancient brews played a part in the afterlife, community projects, and building civilization itself
When I was younger, alcohol led to idiocy. The liquid was a magical tool that created an altered state of fun that could make any ordinary night enjoyable. Therefore, the drink itself wasn’t important, but the endpoint it took us to.
This was reflected in our choice of beers, which were usually the cheapest and most awful thing available. Between the terrible flavors and the dumb things we did after a night of drinking, warnings from the old folks around us made more sense.
“Nothing ever good comes from alcohol,” was the usual chorus we got most, and part of me wondered if it was true. But as I got older, another weird thing about alcohol presented itself — some viewed it as an art, not idiocy.
I got introduced to craft brews and Belgian artisan-style beers.
Suddenly, the amber liquid took on a whole new robust taste and its brewers became artists searching for new flavors or continuing beloved recipes from the past. The German government even passed “purity laws” to enforce specific standards on their brewers.
Our ancient ancestors saw it the same way. While it may sound ridiculous, alcohol was a powerful force in their lives and may have been a reason humanity settled into communities. Archeologists are finding compelling evidence of this.
Alcohol was used in afterlife rituals to mark the passing of group members.
Neolithic people went to great trouble to gather exotic plants to produce their brews.
Alcohol was used as a social lubricant for ancient community projects and gatherings.
A good example of this is a discovery of a nine-thousand-year-old grave site in China, which not only shows alcohol use, but its power in the culture.
Ritual Burial And Elaborate Painted Pottery
Archeologist Jiajing Wang and his associates say the Yangtze River Valley of southern China is a major hub of rice production. It’s been this way for about five thousand years. However, in the time of the Neolithic Shangshan people, things were different.
They were one of the first cultures in this area to settle down and experiment with rice cultivation between eight and ten thousand years ago. Eighteen sites they occupied have been studied, and evidence of some of the first permanent storage facilities in the region is shown. But the most interesting might be Qiaotou.
A burial mound was found at this site containing two skeletons buried facing East. The mound itself was about two hundred feet in length and width, then was encircled by a ditch which created a river channel around the compound. There was also elaborate pottery buried within, and postholes indicating architecture above.
The pottery itself was eye-catching. Wang and his associates say it “represents the earliest known painted pottery in the world” with abstract designs, which were slip-painted (or painted with crushed and dyed pottery pieces). The narrow-necked vessels were particularly interesting because they resembled alcohol jugs from later periods.
The archeological team wondered if this was a ritualistic site associated with alcohol, so they analyzed twenty pieces of the pottery looking for signs of beer-making.
A Luxury Food For A Special Purpose
“For the Shangshan people, beer was likely a “special” or “luxury” food. Previous studies have developed a series of criteria for identifying socially valued foods in the archaeological record. These foods are generally rare, exotic, expensive to procure and process, symbolically potent, and valued for their taste or other qualities.”
— Wang J, Jiang L, Sun H (2021) Early evidence for beer drinking in a 9000-year-old platform mound in southern China. PLoS ONE 16(8)
Wang and his associates say beer-making requires two things: saccharification where starches are broken down into sugars and fermentation where yeasts convert sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide. The process leaves evidence on containers.
The archeologists explain this is particularly true with early brews because they were more like porridge, and excess material soaked into the pots. Overall, fifteen of the pots showed evidence of starches being cooked in them, while eight indicated signs of fermentation.
By studying phytoliths, or microscopic silica bodies left from a plant’s structure, the team found that the Shangshan were fermenting rice, tubers, and a local cereal crop called Job’s Tears. Some of the brewing process also showed marks like processes of beer-making in Asia today.
Wang and his associates say:
“Analyses of fungal particles revealed abundant fermentation-related molds and yeast cells. The molds are morphologically consistent with Aspergillus and Rhizopus, typical microorganisms used for making rice beer in East and Southeast Asia…The presence of specialized molds suggests that a mold starter was used for simultaneous saccharification and fermentation.”
They identified the mold starter as “qu,” and it was the earliest evidence of using one of these starters in beer-making, predating any recorded material by about eight thousand years. The team says:
“Without scientific knowledge, people at Qiaotou probably made beer by mixing cooked rice, Job’s tears, and tubers; saccharification and fermentation occurred simultaneously through the addition of qu, and upon further storage, a fragrant liquor was made.”
The archeologists believe all this evidence points to Qiaotou being a special place.
The pottery used there was different than the coarse, undecorated pottery generally used.
Rice wasn’t an easy food to obtain. The archeologists believed this crop could require three times as much labor versus acorns and typical forgeable vegetables that grew in the area, along with shellfish.
Evidence of rice use wasn’t as widespread at other Shangshan sites excavated. Not to mention the effort put into the building of Qiaotou and the ceremonial burial, which are also good indicators.
This isn’t a one-off, either. It’s only one piece of a series of archeological finds indicating that ancient people went to lengths to make alcohol, and it functioned as a societal cohesion tool.
A Spiritual And Social Tool Worthy Of Effort
In another dig, Jiajing Wang, Li Liu, and another group of archeologists found two pits in the Yellow River Valley area of China that looked like beer brewing facilities. They were dated to about three thousand BC and indicated much more advanced capabilities.
The pits showed evidence of three major activities: “brewing, filtration, and storage.” Moreover, each pit had a stove. But one of the most interesting things about the find was the beer recipe itself.
Wang and his team found evidence of barley in the brewing process. However, this crop wasn’t a staple for this region, until about twenty-eight hundred years later. It was previously thought the first evidence of barley in China was about a thousand years later than the find in the pit.
This led the archeologists to believe barley was an exotic food gathered strictly for the brewing process. Wang and his team think alcohol was used by elite individuals for ritual feasts, building projects, and may have been a spark for hierarchal societies in the region.
However, the oldest evidence of beer production was discovered by a team led by Stanford archeologist Li Liu. It dates to about thirteen thousand years ago with the Natufians around Israel.
These Neolithic people not only had skills with plant dyes, but also had a penchant for brewing before the cultivation of cereal crops. It set off a debate about what came first: beer or bread. According to Li Liu:
“This discovery indicates that making alcohol was not necessarily a result of agricultural surplus production, but it was developed for ritual purposes and spiritual needs, at least to some extent, prior to agriculture.”
She explains that the first evidence of beer and bread in this region is roughly around the same period.
Dr. Martin Zarnkow, head of research and development at the Weihenstephan Research Center for Brewing and Food Quality at the Technical University at Munich, believes there might be another large discovery on the horizon. He studied the ancient site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.
In Brian Muraresku’s book The Immortality Key, Dr. Zarnkow reveals the massive eleven thousand-year-old site has troughs and basins that could “accommodate forty-two gallons of liquid.” There’s also residue in some. So, ritual and feasting may have played a part in the community building the structure.
Dr. Zarnkow and his team studied the residue and found calcium oxalate, which can be found in beer production. However, evidence of alcohol was too inconclusive to claim this for certain. Although Zarnkow believes the troughs were used for brewing and plans to take more samples.
He also notes you don’t have to use heat for brewing, just putting cereal in water can lead to natural fermentation. The yeast could come from your hand itself. So, our species’ love affair with alcohol might be much older than we can imagine.
All these findings got me thinking about a recent episode in my life.
A Funeral And Shades Of Our Ancient Past
My older brother died about a year ago. After the funeral, we all went to a bar that some of his friends rented out. Family, friends, and neighbors all gathered around with alcohol in a final act of celebration and mourning.
I couldn’t help viewing this memory in my mind while I’ve been writing about our ancestors using alcohol for rituals and community cohesion.
Some may say nothing good comes of alcohol, but at least to the archeological record, that’s not exactly true. “Graveyard” brews helped our ancestors navigate the path between life and death, plus provided social cohesion, which led to greater community efforts.
They devoted their limited resources to obtaining exotic crops for the brewing process and dedicated their finest pottery as vessels. Some even believe it may have created the structure from which settled societies grew.
While others may debate this, at least in my family’s crisis, the much- maligned liquid from my youth created a sense of community in a terrible time of need. I now understand why it was so important to our ancestors.
-Originally posted on Medium 2/4/24