Inside Out | Eat, drink and be merry – it’s in our genes
Humans may have surrendered their hunter-gatherer nomadic lives to settle in permanent villages not in order to grow food and bake bread, but to brew beer, wine and other alcohols
People jest that the oldest profession is prostitution. But it seems this claim may be off by several thousand years. The really oldest professions may be priests and brewers – though who knows whether these ancient professions ever called for the services of the ladies of the night. Maybe it’s a draw.
It’s the brewers that really prompted me to pause. Maybe it’s the fact that I have just finished my seven day starvation detox in Thailand, and have been fantasising a lot about a long cool beer.
Maybe it’s the scent of Hong Kong’s Rugby Sevens, now just five weeks away. Either way, a recent fascinating essay on the incredibly long history of beer at the heart of human civilisation in the latest National Geographic got me thinking.
Recent findings by archaeologists in many parts of the world are revealing some astonishing things: it seems humans may have surrendered their hunter-gatherer nomadic lives to settle in permanent villages not in order to grow food and bake bread, but to brew beer, wine and other alcohols.
Look at a site called Gobekli Tepe in Turkey on the border with Syria 11,600 years ago.
Apparently our nomadic forebears used to gather regularly for big religious events, and used free beer as inducements for volunteers to build the huge celebratory buildings necessary for the celebrations. Apparently the Egyptian Pharoahs ran numerous industrial scale breweries to keep the Pyramid builders hard at work. So perhaps beer – not bread – really did inspire the original farming of grains.