Drinking isn’t for everyone. But it’s possible that without alcohol, there wouldn’t be anyone. That is, a taste for and tolerance of fermented fruits and roots may be the evolutionary advantage that helped Homo erectus climb down for cocktail hour, leaving the other simians stuck up a tree.
This is one of the theories entertained in an amusing — well, amusing for an academic work — text just out from Princeton University Press: Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human. The authors are Monica Sanchez, a medical anthropologist, and Rob Dunn, who teaches at the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics at the University of Copenhagen. What? Never heard of evolutionary hologenomics? I thought by now every scientifically literate high school sophomore knew that evolutionary hologenomics is the study of how organisms symbiotically evolve with microbes, viruses, and some other stuff not mentioned on Google, where I went to look up what the heck hologenomics is.
One of the questions about alcohol taken up by Sanchez and Dunn is the chicken-and-egg one: Which came first, agriculture or alcohol? The standard answer is agriculture. Grow crops, and if you’re lucky, you end up with more than you can eat. But how to store the surplus? Our Neolithic ancestors didn’t have the luxury of grain silos. They did know, however, how to ferment that excess grain into beer, a way of preserving it.
Or at least, that’s the old-school explanation: 1) agriculture provides a superabundance, and 2) fermentation preserves the leftovers.
What if it was the other way around? 1) Early man discovers the joys of strong drink, and 2) he pursues agriculture as a way to give himself something to ferment.
Katie Amato is a primatologist at Northwestern University who suggests that the earliest wine-making was done some millions of misty years in the past by hominins who started fermenting fruit.
Our distant, lantern-jawed relatives might have tamed canines and penned up pigs, but those animals may not have been the first domesticated creatures. Botanist Jonathan Sauer suggests that, as Dunn and Sanchez put it, “the first species domesticated by humans were the microbes used in making sour beer and sourdough bread.”
It’s a remarkable accomplishment enough for ancient man to have bent wild animals to his will (or as Sophocles sings, “Such inventiveness is man./Through his inventions he becomes lord/Even of the beasts of the mountain: the long-haired/Horse he subdues to the yoke on his neck.”) But though difficult, there’s something obvious about contesting with and catching other animals. Fermentation is another matter altogether. It entails controlling living things too small to see, such as saccharomyces cerevisiae, more commonly known as yeast.
In what would be an extraordinary leap of imagination, early man set out to keep his microbial draught horses of fermentation well fed: “Humans found themselves in need of a more reliable source of fodder for those microbes,” write Dunn and Sanchez. “Then, and only then, they began to domesticate grains in order to feed the microbes in order to make beer.”
If this theory is true, beer and wine are the source of civilization. It isn’t agriculture that came first, but fermentation. Agriculture was the handmaiden of the brewer.
There are other reasons to think that we are a species evolved to drink alcohol. We may think of the lowly liver as a weak spot, an organ likely to fail if persistently abused, but the livers of gorillas, chimps, and humans are highly efficient, metabolizing alcohol 40 times faster than those of more teetotaling primates. “As a result,” write Sanchez and Dunn, “these species can safely ingest more alcohol and, in so doing, rely on its calories and benefits with potentially fewer negative consequences.”
It sounds plausible to me, and not (well not entirely) because I like to think of alcohol, moderately consumed, as one of life’s signal pleasures. I like the idea that strong drink isn’t just civilized but civilizing.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
