When Did Ancient Humans Start Drinking Alcohol? transcript

Right now, you're probably drunk or about to get drunk. And the last time you had a drink, beer, wine, whatever, you probably just drank it and forgot about it. But what you did is one of the oldest things a human being can do. It's older than writing, older than farming. It actually predates humans beings entirely. Because our relationship with alcohol doesn't start a few thousand years ago with the invention of wine or the first brewery.

It starts about 10 million years ago on a forest floor in Africa with a small primate picking up a piece of fruit that had been sitting on the ground for too long. In 2014, a biologist at UC Berkeley named Robert Dudley published a book called The Drunken Monkey. His argument was simple. When fruit falls from a tree and sits on the ground, the natural sugars inside it start breaking down. Yeast gets in, fermentation begins, and the fruit starts producing small amounts of ethanol.

And when primates ate that fruit, the ethanol inside it made them feel a little drunk. They had no idea why, but it felt good. So, they kept coming back for more. Over millions of years, our ancestors didn't just tolerate alcohol. They evolved to look for it. So, by the time ancient humans actually showed up, the taste for it was already built in. It was there long before anyone figured out how to make it on purpose.

The question is, when did they figure that out? In 2018, archaeologists were excavating a cave near Haifa, Israel. The cave is called Raqefet, and it was used by a group called the Natufians about 13,000 years ago. Inside, they found stone mortars carved directly into the bedrock. When they analyzed the residue left in those mortars, they found traces of wheat and barley that had been soaked, germinated, and left to ferment.

That's beer, brewed in a cave 13,000 years ago. Now, here's what makes that finding so important. The Natufians were not farmers. They hadn't invented agriculture yet. They were still collecting wild grain by hand and hunting animals for meat. They didn't grow the barley, they found it. But somehow, making beer was important enough that they figured that out first. Think about that. Because up until this discovery, the story goes like this.

Humans settled down, started farming, built villages, and then eventually discovered fermentation and started making drinks. Alcohol came after civilization, but Roc de la Cave says the opposite. These people were brewing while they were still nomadic, and they aren't the only ones. About a thousand years later, someone in southeastern Turkey built something enormous. At a site called Göbekli Tepe, massive stone pillars, some weighing over 10 tons, were arranged in careful circles and carved with images of animals.

The whole structure was deliberate and complex, and it was built before farming, before pottery, before anyone in the region had a permanent home. These were still hunter-gatherers. For years, archaeologists couldn't explain why nomadic people would organize the labor needed to move 10-ton stones up a hill and carve them with precision. What would motivate that? Then they found large stone vats at the site. When they tested the insides, they found chemical traces of fermented grain.

People were brewing at Göbekli Tepe, not small amounts, enough for large gatherings. The current theory is that this site wasn't a home. It was a gathering place for ritual and feasting. People traveled from across the region, came together, and drank. And this raises a question that's been debated for decades. Why did humans start farming? An archaeobotanist named Patrick McGovern, the leading expert on ancient alcohol in the world, has spent decades arguing that humans didn't start farming to make bread.

They started farming to make beer. And I couldn't agree more. He says that bread requires grinding, kneading, and baking. It's a complex process. Beer is simpler. You soak grain in water, leave it alone, and fermentation happens by itself. And the desire to drink would have been a stronger motivator than the desire to eat grain in a slightly different form. If he's right, then alcohol isn't something that showed up after humans settled down.

It might be the reason they settled down in the first place. By 7000 BCE, the evidence gets more precise. In a Neolithic village called Jiahu in central China, archaeologists found pottery jars containing residue from a fermented drink made of rice, honey, grapes, and hawthorn berries. Chemical analysis confirmed the ingredients and the fermentation process. This is the oldest confirmed recipe for alcohol anywhere in the world, and it wasn't crude, it was a blend.

Multiple ingredients carefully chosen and combined. Whoever made this knew exactly what they were doing. From there, it only grew. By the time ancient Egypt came around, beer wasn't something people made for fun. It was woven into everything. Workers who built the pyramids were paid in beer, about 4 to 5 L a day. That was their actual salary, not coins, not grain, but beer. And it made sense because the water from the Nile was often contaminated and unsafe to drink straight.

But beer, because of the brewing process, was cleaner. So it kept people alive in a way water couldn't. Honestly, if you were working in the desert heat and someone gave you a choice between a bag of coins or 5 L of cold beer, what are you picking? >> [clears throat] >> Yeah, same. And on top of that, the brewing process added calories and nutrients. For a laborer dragging limestone blocks in the desert heat, those extra calories mattered.

Beer wasn't just a drink, it was lunch. And then there was the religious side. The Egyptians believed beer was created by Osiris and given to humans as a gift. It showed up in temple offerings, burial rituals, and medical prescriptions. Doctors would mix herbs into beer and prescribe it for everything from stomach problems to infections. So one single drink was doing the job of a paycheck, a water filter, a meal, a medicine, and a prayer all from the same cup.

So here's the full picture. 10 million years ago, your ancestors were drawn to fermented fruit because it helped them find food. 13,000 years ago, they were deliberately brewing in caves before they knew how to farm. 12,000 years ago, they were possibly building the first monuments in human history just to have a place to drink together. 9,000 years ago, they had recipes. 5,000 years ago, entire civilizations were running on it.

Alcohol didn't come after we built the world we live in. There's a real possibility that it's the reason we built it at all. Every time you have a drink, you're continuing something that started before your species had a name for itself. The process changed, the ingredients improved, the cups got fancier, but the impulse is the same one that made a small primate reach for a piece of overripe fruit on a forest floor 10 million years ago.

We just learned how to make it on purpose. If you want to dig deeper into any of this, all the research is linked down in the description.