Ferment in the family tree

Extract

In 1953, botanist Jonathan D. Sauer suggested that our initial motivation to cultivate cereals was not for flour or bread, but for beer (1). The implications of this idea—that a preference for dietary ethanol, or alcohol, sparked the Neolithic Revolution (2)—are profound. No stage of human evolution has left a larger global footprint than the domestication of plants, animals, and landscapes (3). However, there is scant evidence of directed fermentation before the onset of the Neolithic, approximately 10,000 B.C.E. (4). The earliest archaeological evidence of alcohol is associated with the cultivation (5) and initial domestication (6) of cereals during the early Neolithic (Fig. 1), which suggests that fermentation was the happy outcome, rather than the cause, of grain storage and consumption.