I think this applies to milk/yogurt/cheese also.   Oliva

-----Original Message-----
>Quite to the contrary, I find it difficult to imagine how these people
could
>have avoided being familiar with and making the most of fermentation. The
>simplest example of grapes that were picked and not immediately consumed
but
>placed in a container such as a gourd or skin of some sort, comes to mind.
>The fermentation starts immediately and is ongoing. The 'blush' of the
grape
>is the source of the micro-organisms that do the work of fermenting the
grape
>sugar. It would not be long before someone tasted that grape-mush and
>discovered the fermented product. After a longer time and as fermentation
>proceeds the result would have changed the initial alcoholic mush into a
>vinegar mush. It is even simpler to imagine these people coming across
larger
>fruit that begin fermenting after having fallen to the ground. Cows eat
>apples that have appreciable content of alcohol and continue to do so to
>intoxication! It is probably more appropriate to assume that all of the
>fermentedfoodstuffs would have been encountered by one or another group.