Loren wrote me this note last week but due to the birth of my son I am only
now getting caught up with old mail. Loren suggested that if I found this
sufficiently interesting I could repost it to the list. I do, so I have.
---begin letter from Loren---
Dean,
In order for pre-agricultural man to make ethanol, he had to
have had a water tight container, yeast and a very large source of
concentrated carbohydrate whose food calories could be "wasted" to
produce an ethanol containing drink. Although these requirements
could have easily been put together by post-agricultural man, I maintain
that it would have been difficult or impossible (particularly in higher
latitudes) for pre-agricultural man to produce ethanol, primarily
because of the lack of a readily available carbohydrate source which
could be afforded to be "wasted". The first documented production of
beer is known from a beer recipe written in Sumerian on clay tablets
from the 3rd millennium BC in Mesopotamia (1).
Making ethanol from grain is more difficult than making ethanol
from fruits with high sugar content because the starch in the grain must
first be converted into sugars. Therefore, it could be assumed as
Mavis Wood has suggested, that pre-agricultural man made ethanol
containing drinks by fermenting fruits with high sugar contents.
However, there is scant information from either the fossil or written
anthropological record to suggest that this was done. In North
America, no alcoholic beverages were made in pre-Columbian times North
of Mexico (2).
I am unaware of any reports of hunter-gatherers consuming
alcohol, and this consensus is similar to Boyd Eaton's (3).
Cordially,
Loren Cordain, Ph.D.
Professor, ESS Dept
Colo State Univ
REFERENCES
1. Katz SH, Voigt MM. Bread and beer: the early use of cereals in
the human diet. Expedition 1987;28:23-34.
2. Braidwood, RJ et al. Did man once live by beer alone? American
Anthropologist 1953;55:515-26.
3. Eaton SB et al. The Paleolithic Prescription. Harper & Row,
NY, 1989, p.45.
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