A single amino acid mutation roughly 10 million years ago gave the ancestors of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas the ability to metabolize alcohol, according to a 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The mutation, called A294V, affected an enzyme known as ADH4, which begins breaking down ethanol in the mouth and stomach. The change made the enzyme roughly 40 times more efficient at processing alcohol. Biochemists Matthew Carrigan and Steven Benner connected the mutation to a shift in habitat.
As ape ancestors spent more time on the forest floor, they encountered overripe, fermented fruit that could reach alcohol concentrations of several percent. Without the mutation, consuming large amounts of that fruit could be fatal. With it, the fallen fruit became a viable food source. Modern research supports the idea that animals consume fermented foods more often than previously assumed.
A 2022 study led by primatologist Christina Campbell, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that wild spider monkeys in Panama routinely eat fruit with 1 to 2 percent alcohol by volume, with ethanol byproducts later detected in their urine. Pen-tailed tree shrews in Malaysia drink fermented palm nectar up to 3. 8 percent alcohol nightly without visible signs of intoxication, while cedar waxwings in California have died after gorging on fermented hawthorn berries. The oldest evidence of intentional alcohol production by humans was announced in 2018 by Stanford archaeologist Li Liu and her team in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports.
At Raqefet Cave in northern Israel, a Natufian burial site dating to roughly 13,000 BC, researchers analyzed three stone mortars carved into the bedrock and found residue consistent with malted wheat and barley. The finding predates the earliest known cereal agriculture in the region by about 3,000 years. The mortars were located inside a graveyard, indicating the beer was brewed for funeral rituals. Liu said the evidence represents the oldest record of man-made alcohol in the world, likely made to honor the dead.
The team replicated the ancient process and produced a low-alcohol, soup-like beer. The oldest chemically confirmed alcoholic beverage comes from the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Henan province, China, occupied from roughly 7,000 to 6,600 BC. The site is already famous for the Jiahu flutes, the oldest playable musical instruments known, and for tortoise shells bearing proto-writing marks. In 2004, Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum published an analysis in PNAS of residue from 16 pottery jars at the site, identifying a fermented blend of rice, honey, and fruit.
In 2006, McGovern worked with Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Brewery to produce a commercial beer based on the ancient recipe, called Chateau Jiahu. It is brewed with brown rice syrup, orange blossom honey, Muscat grapes, and hawthorn fruit and periodically returns to production. The idea that beer, rather than bread, drove the domestication of grain was raised in 1953 at the American Anthropologist Symposium on the origins of agriculture. A botanist named Jonathan Sauer asked archaeologist Robert Braidwood whether fermented grain might have been a greater stimulus for cereal cultivation than flour and bread-making.
The question was recorded and has remained a subject of scholarly debate for decades. In 1986, Solomon Katz of the University of Pennsylvania and Mary Voytek argued in the magazine Expedition that fermented grain is more nutritious than unleavened bread. Fermentation releases B vitamins and predigests antinutrients, they wrote, making beer a shelf-stable, socially significant, and more nutritious product per labor hour than bread. Proponents of the theory point to Göbekli Tepe, a massive carved-stone ritual complex in southeastern Turkey dating to roughly 9,000 BC.
Excavated by Klaus Schmidt until his death in 2014, the site contains T-shaped limestone pillars weighing up to 20 tons. Large stone basins found there, some holding 160 liters, contained calcium oxalate residue, a mineral deposit associated with mashing and fermenting grain. A 2012 paper by Oliver Dietrich and Schmidt suggested the basins were used for brewing, implying humans may have brewed beer for gatherings before they cultivated grain in fields. Not all archaeologists accept this interpretation, and the evidence is considered consistent with brewing but not conclusive.
By Sumerian times, around 4,000 years ago, alcohol had become an institution. The Sumerians had a goddess of brewing named Ninkasi, whose name roughly translates as the lady who fills the mouth. The Hymn to Ninkasi, composed around 1800 BC and surviving on clay tablets, is both a religious prayer and a step-by-step beer recipe involving a starter dough called bappir and malted grain soaked in jars. In 1989, brewmaster Fritz Maytag of Anchor Brewing in San Francisco collaborated with Sumerologist Miguel Civil, whose 1964 translation of the hymn remains standard, to brew a batch based on the text.
The result was a low-alcohol beverage of about 3. 5 percent, drunk through long reed straws from a shared vessel, as the Sumerians had done to avoid the floating mash. Beer functioned as currency in Sumerian wage labor. A clay tablet from around 2050 BC, held at Trinity College in Dublin, records that a man named Ur-Amma received roughly 4.
5 liters of best-grade beer from his brewer. The Code of Hammurabi, dating to about 1750 BC, included sections regulating alehouses. The penalty for a tavern keeper defrauding a customer on beer prices was drowning, and a priestess caught drinking in a tavern faced execution by burning. The Egyptians ran large parts of their state on beer.
At Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt, archaeologists have found the remains of a brewery from around 3500 BC with 12 large vats, each capable of producing several hundred liters per cycle. It is currently considered the oldest industrial-scale brewery known. During construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza around 2500 BC, workers at the nearby settlement of Heit el-Ghurab received daily rations of bread, onions, and beer. The commonly cited figure of 4 to 5 liters per worker per day is an extrapolation from jar capacities rather than a documented number.
What is solid is that pyramid workers were paid, in part, in beer. Egyptian beer of that period was thick, around 3 to 4 percent alcohol, closer to liquid porridge than modern lager. One Egyptian myth describes beer saving humanity. In the Book of the Heavenly Cow, the god Ra sends his daughter Sekhmet to destroy humans.
When he changes his mind, he orders 7,000 jugs of beer dyed red with ochre poured out across the fields of Dendera. Sekhmet mistook it for blood, drank it all, passed out, and woke up as the gentle goddess Hathor. The story was celebrated at the annual Festival of Drunkenness held at the Temple of Mut in Karnak, where Egyptologist Betsy Bryan of Johns Hopkins University excavated a structure called the Porch of Drunkenness, built by pharaoh Hatshepsut around 1470 BC. Its inscriptions describe ritual intoxication as a form of religious devotion.
The oldest chemical evidence of wine in the world was found in 2017 in pottery sherds from two Neolithic villages in Georgia, south of Tbilisi, dating to around 6,000 BC. Patrick McGovern led the analysis, published in PNAS, which identified tartaric, malic, succinic, and citric acids in proportions matching grape juice. The conclusion was that the site represents the oldest example of Eurasian grape domestication solely for wine production. Georgia is now considered the origin point of wine culture, around 8,000 years ago.
The previous title holder was Firuz Tepe in northwestern Iran, where McGovern had found wine residue in jars dating to about 5,400 BC, made with terebinth tree resin as a preservative, a technique modern Greeks still use for retsina. The most complete early winery was found in Armenia. In 2007, a team led by Boris Gasparian, Gregory Areshian, and Ron Pinhasi discovered inside Areni-1 Cave a fully intact wine production facility from around 4,100 BC. It contained a clay basin for stomping grapes, a 60-centimeter-deep fermentation vat, storage jars, ceramic drinking cups, and desiccated grape pits, vine stems, and grape skins.
Residue tested positive for malvidin, the pigment that gives red wine its color. Like Raqefet Cave, the facility was located inside a burial cave, indicating the wine was made for funeral rituals. A side chamber of the same cave contains the oldest complete leather shoe in the world, dated to about 3,500 BC. Greek wine culture developed a strict protocol.
The symposium, which literally means drinking together, always involved cutting wine with water before serving. Standard Athenian ratios were three parts water to one part wine for an evening of discussion, two parts for a livelier feast, and one to one for an excessive night. Drinking wine straight was considered the practice of barbarians, specifically the Scythians and Thracians, according to Plato. The central object of the symposium was a mixing bowl called a krater, with the symposiarch deciding the ratio.
The Romans inherited Greek wine culture and expanded it. In 186 BC, the Roman Senate passed a decree restricting the secret cult of Bacchus, which they feared had grown into a conspiracy involving thousands. The historian Livy described the Bacchanalia scandal in lurid detail, including ritual murder and orgies, though modern historians treat much of that account as exaggeration. Pliny the Elder cataloged 195 named wines in his Natural History and gave rise to the proverb in vino veritas, that truth is commonly ascribed to wine.
Distillation was refined in the medieval Islamic world, though the basic technique predates Islam. An Alexandrian alchemist known as Maria the Jewess, working around 300 AD, invented a three-spouted apparatus called the tribikos and gave her name to the bain-marie. The systematic chemistry of distillation was developed primarily by two men. Jabir ibn Hayyan, who lived around 721 to 815 AD, codified the alembic, an apparatus named from the Arabic al-anbiq.
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, who lived from around 854 to 925 AD, wrote the Kitab al-Asrar, or Book of Secrets, describing practical distillation in detail. He is the first known figure to isolate ethanol as a distinct substance, for medicinal and chemical purposes. The word alcohol comes from al-kuhl, an Arabic term for a fine antimony powder used as eyeliner, known in English as kohl. Arab alchemists adopted the term for any finely refined essence produced by distillation.
In 16th-century European chemistry, alcohol vini meant the essence of wine, and by the 18th century, the word had narrowed to mean ethanol specifically. The technique entered Christian Europe through the medical school at Salerno and through Spain. Catalan physician Arnaldus de Villanova, working at Montpellier in the late 13th century, treated distilled wine as medicine and called it aqua vitae, the water of life. In Gaelic, it became uisce beatha, the source of the modern word whiskey.
In Polish and Russian, it became woda, the source of vodka. In Spanish, it became aguardiente, burning water. The first documentary mention of Scotch whisky is a 1494 entry in the Exchequer Rolls recording eight bowls of malt issued to a friar named John Cor to make aqua vitae. In Central Mexico, the Aztecs made pulque, the fermented sap of the agave plant, at 4 to 8 percent alcohol.
The goddess of the agave was Mayahuel, depicted with 400 breasts, and her partner was Patecatl, god of the herbs that triggered fermentation. Their children were the Centzon Totochtin, the 400 rabbits, each personifying a grade of drunkenness from cheerful to belligerent to weepy. Their leader was Ometochtli, Two Rabbit, whose temple still stands above the town of Tepoztlán in Morelos. Spanish missionary Bernardino de Sahagún dedicated chapters of the 16th-century Florentine Codex to pulque rituals and law.
Under Aztec law, public drunkenness was punishable by death for commoners under 52. After that age, the law assumed the drinker had earned the right to drink freely. Across the Andes, civilizations produced chicha, a corn beer fermented by chewing the corn first to let saliva convert the starches. The Japanese produced kuchikamizake with the same chewing technique.
Two continents independently invented the same method. Every major civilization in recorded history has had a deity, a ration system, a tax, a song, or a law about alcohol, and most had all five. The chemical accident that began on the forest floor ten million years ago still runs the bar.
