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Commentary

Ferment in the family tree

View ORCID ProfileNathaniel J. Dominy
  1. Departments of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755-3537

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PNAS first published December 31, 2014; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1421566112
Nathaniel J. Dominy
Departments of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755-3537
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  • ORCID record for Nathaniel J. Dominy
  • For correspondence: nathaniel.j.dominy@dartmouth.edu
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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.

Footnotes

  • ↵1Email: nathaniel.j.dominy{at}dartmouth.edu.
  • Author contributions: N.J.D. wrote the paper.

  • The author declares no conflict of interest.

  • See companion article 10.1073/pnas.1404167111.

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Ferment in the family tree
Nathaniel J. Dominy
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec 2014, 201421566; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1421566112

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Ferment in the family tree
Nathaniel J. Dominy
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec 2014, 201421566; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1421566112
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 118 (16)
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