Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland

So, the story goes, sometime after mastering farming, humans also began to enjoy the benefits of beer, with similar processes around the world leading to grape, millet, rice, and maize-based alcoholic drinks. People finally had something tasty to pair with their bread and cheese. This is the standard account of the origin of alcohol production—that it’s an accident, an unintended consequence of the invention of agriculture. Around the 1950s, though, this story began to be questioned by proponents of various “beer before bread” theories.1 They pointed out that large-scale, likely alcohol-fueled feasting, which often brought together people from far-flung regions for days of music, dancing, rituals, drinking, and sacrifices, began well before settled agriculture. At Göbekli Tepe, a site in what is now modern-day Turkey we’ll talk about more below, hunter-gatherers convened regularly throughout the tenth to eighth millennia BCE to feast on gazelles, build circular structures, and erect enormous T-shaped limestone pillars carved with mysterious pictograms and animal forms—probably all while well-lubricated with beer.