Asvetic

@iGadget_Berlin - The internet was invented in the 60s, and computers much earlier. Not due to LSD, but instead to military and scientific need. Also to out-do the commies.

tf5_bassist

The Beer Theory of Civilization
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One of the biggest unanswered questions in archaeology is how and why humans domesticated crops like Barley or maize. The domesticated strains we have today bear little resemblance to anything that existed even just 20,000 years ago. (e.g. Maize, or corn, is thought to be derived from teosinte, which literally looks like grass. No big juicy kernals at all.) If you took the ancient ancestors of today's food crops and handed them to a modern farmer with all his wonderful machinery, he wouldn't be able to feed his own family, let alone support the kind of town filled with specialized laborers that heralded the very beginnings of what we consider to be civilization.

This is the great conundrum posed by the birth of agriculture. It would have taken many centuries of selective breeding to produce crops that could support an agricultural society before any such society could have made the move to agriculture. The crop and the farmer are like the chicken and the egg, only we know that at some point, one actually came into being where neither existed before.

Here's where beer comes in. While undomesticated forms of barley or maize could not have supported an agricultural lifestyle, small ammounts of the stuff might have been sufficient to make small batches of alchohol. (i.e. Beer for barley, chicha for corn) It has been theorized that early beer might have had religious purposes.

Aside: Take that with a grain of salt since "possibly of religious significance" is arky-speak for "we have no farking clue what it was for." It's quite possible that, if you look around the room you're in right now, you'll see several objects that could have "religious significance" in a thousand years that have none now.

Regardless of whether or not it was a religious ho-down, it makes sense for beer to have preceeded argriculture. It solves the chicken-and-the-egg problem very nicely. Now we can suppose that our hunter-gather ancestors did not rely upon barley for food, but nonetheless they had an interest in tinkering around to reduce the work needed for a good keg party. They might have started gathering seed and sewing it in patches to reduce the ammount of walking around involved in gathering it. Then they might have started selectively sewing barley with the biggest grains, etc.. Eventually, after centuries of booze, barley and corn would have become crops productive enough to be worth settling down and growing full-time. i.e. Beer made the crop, which then made the farmer.

Now, the story doesn't end there. Beer may well have played a pivotal role in helping humanity through the early stages of urban civilization as well. Agriculture, of course, provided a stable and dense enough supply of food that people could stop moving around with the herds and settle down permanently, and in large enough numbers that you could have specialization of labour. (e.g. A blacksmith or a stone mason) However, such early cities probably didn't have very good sanitation. Our ancestors were, after all, figuring it all out as they went. People would probably have been pissing and shitting in the nearest river, making drinking from that river decidely unsafe. Beer, on the other hand, is not something which bacteria thrive in! Beer could have been the safe drink that kept people healthy when the water was unsafe to drink. (Beer does a body good eh!)

Another major problem with early civilization was crushing peole's hunter-gatherer spirits and getting them to blindly accept authority. i.e. If the chief says "Go invade those suckers over there and then build me a pyramid", you don't want the people saying, "Hey, screw you buddy! We can go back to hunting wild goats anytime we want!" Just think where we'd be today if we had gone back to hunting goats! If the chief had instead said "Hey, do what I want and it's free beer for all!" then early civilization might have had a chance to get off the ground and move on to truly great things like war and slave labor.

So that's the beer theory of civilization. It drove the domestication of crops that made agriculture possible, which made cities possible, which made the water suck when people shat in it, but again Beer saved the day both by providing something safe to drink and keeping people just sloshed enough to wage war and build giant stone phallic symbols.

Glory be unto BEER!

CircusSeal

willyolio

everybody knows, that the Internet, apple computers & iPods (and I guess a whole lotta otha things) came in mind during the acid tests in the early 7t's. LSD not beer was the crux!

iGadget_Berlin

Munch the BanNail

Thunderous_Thor

Trowble (XBL/PSN)

hypereric

TerryinSt.Paul

auroragb

Gizmo

BTW, you forgot to have her clean up the kitchen after the wort boils over.

hypereric

Mischif