On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Jim Swayze wrote:

> While that is very easy to imagine, I'll agree, I think the standard needs
> to be that our ancestors were drinking alcoholic concoctions as part of the
> entire species' regular diet for, say, 250,000 years (or 500,000 years or
> whatever time period necessary to adapt to the new foodstuff).  It is not
> sufficient that this group or that accidentally tried it a few times,
> relatively speaking.

That seems to contradict what is widely known about the correlation
between how long a group of people have been exposed to alchohol and the
corresponding incidence of "alcoholism" and alcohol related problems.

Native americans, with the shortest timeframe of exposure to alcohol, have
one of the highest rates of alcohol problems...same goes for Australian
Aborgines. Next in line would probably be northern Europeans...
(that also correlates with how long a group of people have been
"civilized" ...or abandoned their hunter gatherer life).

On the opposite end of the spectrum...the Mediteranean cultures who have
had alcohol in their culture for up to 10,000 years have a very low rate
of "alcoholism" and alcohol problems... (They've also been "civilized"
much longer).

Natural selection has done it's magic on the gene pool of the
Mediterranean cultures by selecting for genes that say don't cause you to
say get drunk and fall of a cliff or stagger in to a pond full of
crocodiles :)

If alcohol was part of humanities diet for 250-500,000 years...alcohol
simply wouldn't be a problem in our world today.

Ray Audette mentions a book called "Cancer: Disease of Civilization" in
Neanderthin. I'm sure a companion book could be written titled
"Alcoholism: Disease of Civilization."

Craig