'World's oldest brewery' found in cave in Israel, say researchers

[muriel_volestrangler]

Researchers say they have found the world's oldest brewery, with residue of 13,000-year-old beer, in a prehistoric cave near Haifa in Israel.
...
Brewing beer was thought to go back 5,000 years, but the latest discovery may turn beer history on its head.

The findings also suggest beer was not necessarily a surplus of making bread as previously thought.

The researchers say they cannot tell which came first, and in October's issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, they suggest the beer was brewed for ritual feasts to honour the dead.

"This accounts for the oldest record of man-made alcohol in the world," Li Liu, a Stanford University professor who led the research team, told Stanford News.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-45534133

Abstract

Fermented and alcoholic beverages played a pivotal role in feastings and social events in past agricultural and urban societies across the globe, but the origins of the sophisticated relevant technologies remain elusive. It has long been speculated that the thirst for beer may have been the stimulus behind cereal domestication, which led to a major social-technological change in human history; but this hypothesis has been highly controversial. We report here of the earliest archaeological evidence for cereal-based beer brewing by a semi-sedentary, foraging people. The current project incorporates experimental study, contextual examination, and use-wear and residue analyses of three stone mortars from a Natufian burial site at Raqefet Cave, Israel (13,700–11,700 cal. BP). The results of the analyses indicate that the Natufians exploited at least seven plant taxa, including wheat or barley, oat, legumes and bast fibers (including flax). They packed plant-foods, including malted wheat/barley, in fiber-made containers and stored them in boulder mortars. They used bedrock mortars for pounding and cooking plant-foods, including brewing wheat/barley-based beer likely served in ritual feasts ca. 13,000 years ago. These innovations predated the appearance of domesticated cereals by several millennia in the Near East.

[marylandblue]

1. So basically, civilization started with a bunch of drunks in a brew pub

[TomSlick]

3. Don't know about the brew pub but yes, society is based upon the brewing of beer.

Why else would a bunch of hunter/gatherers settle down to grow grain?

[WhiteTara]

2. The story of Inanna was written on tablets

and she talks about beer and love and sex and she has quite the story.

Diane Wolkstein wrote a book based on the tablet translations called Inanna:Queen of Heaven and Earth.