Bread or Beer

After the Super Bowl I was watching the history channel and they had a story about who wrote the first bible, well don't ask me why, but it started me thinking about who made the first beer and an even better question of who first drank the first beer. Whomever it was their names are forever lost to us in antiquity.

The people who have really researched the topic have focused on Mesopotamia as the birthplace of beer since it is apparently the birthplace of grain domestication. Clay tablets thousands of years old indicate that the earliest beer was Sumerian. The thirst quenching beverage apparently played an important role in Sumer; the word for beer turns up in texts relating to medicine, ritual, myth and law. Wine coolers came along later and killed off Sumer.
Of course people can only hypothesize that nature made the first beer. If hunter-gatherers stored wild barley seeds in a container, eventually moisture would get in and the barley would sprout. Sprouted barley is more tender and sweeter than the hard grains; in sprouting, barley produces an enzyme that converts its starch to sugar. Sprouted barley would have become the preferred kind. Doubtless someone dried the sprouts for eating later. Wild yeasts are everywhere, and they would have found enough sugar in the sprouted barley to grow as soon as more water appeared. And sometime, people were hungry enough to try ingesting the "spoiled" fermenting barley. They would have received a fairly nutritious meal, since yeast reduces some indigestible and unpleasant substances in barley and increases B vitamins and amino acids. They probably gained a mellow buzz as well. Bonus. No grinding or baking necessary. And, it makes sense because it is hard to imagine that someone would have the gumption with precious food stuffs to experiment and make beer without it being done naturally first.
Anyway, about 50 years ago a University of Chicago researcher suggested a cause-effect relation between making bread and domesticating grain. He based his argument on evidence from archaeological excavations in what is now Iraq. A counter suggestion quickly came from a University of Wisconsin botanist. Wow, Someone from Wisconsin and Chicago arguing about beer. Go Figure. Anyway, the guy from Wisconsin said beer was the more likely reason. A symposium was quickly organized, given the shocking title "Did man once live by beer alone?" and the debate about why people became farmers began. Did they grow grain first to eat or to drink? I am firmly in the 'to drink' camp. When you think about it, it is really simple. In ancient times people could eat just about anything and survive, but bad water could kill you, so beer was eminently safer and more healthy to drink in order to survive.
To support the beer first theory is that one of the earliest beer-making recipes now known dates from about 1800 BC. The researchers found it encoded within a poem about Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing. Cereal grains were domesticated thousands of years earlier, so the Sumerian text only offers what the researchers called a "time platform" from which to look back, making inferences about earlier procedures. Superficially, a first inference would favor bread: the beer described in the Ninkasi poem was made from bread. So now we have the old chicken or the egg debate but the specific bread was prepared not so much for edibility as for long shelf life---it kept a long while without spoiling. It was eaten only during food shortages. How long did that last loaf of bread you bought last? The bread of that time was nothing like the bread of today. Basically from their research it appears that man made bread in order to store ingredients later used to make beer.
That, at least, is how the cheeseheads and me see it.
Prost, Ron