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

by Edward Slingerland

All of this suggests that it is quite likely that the desire to get drunk or high gave rise to agriculture, rather than the other way around. Agriculture, of course, is the foundation of civilization. This means that our taste for liquid or smokable neurotoxins, the most convenient means for taking the PFC offline, may have been the catalyst for settled agricultural life. Moreover, intoxicants not only lured us into civilization but, as we will explore in this chapter, also helped make it possible for us to become civilized. By causing humans to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal—to live like social insects, despite our ape nature—intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups, domesticate increasing numbers of plants and animals, accumulate new technologies, and thereby create the sprawling civilizations that have made us the dominant mega-fauna on the planet.