Drinks first, food next...

I had seen this bizarre new theory on the origin of civilization while browsing on Gawker.com... Before going to details, let me take you back to some history lessons. We all had learned that some where at the end of stone age, humans, who till then survived by hunting and collecting berries from wild, found cereals and started cultivating them near river banks, settling there permanently and biding good bye to the nomadic life of their ancestors. This one event caused the civilizations, and ultimately we ended up in the present way of living. This taming of cereals, (rice, wheat and other grains) as we learned in our history classes, was basically for food.

If you have studied the Kerala board high school syllabus, some time around late nineties, you might be remembering a chapter about a Russian village, which had surplus rice and the devil teaching those villagers the art of brewing vodka and finally bringing them all and under his grip. So we all came to conclude that surplus grain made men brew alcohol and all of us innocent beings thus became possessed by the evil.

But a recent theory by Brian Hayden, a Canadian Archeologist, totally refutes our innocence and postulates that, cultivation of cereals was in the first place meant for  fermenting beer and not the other way around, making beer responsible for making us live the way we live now... . In a way it makes sense. If it was for food, why should one cultivate cereals, when other edibles like fruits and berries are available? To get rice or wheat to a dining table is quite a cumbersome process, and to think that our ancestors wanted to take all this risk just for that seems unconvincing. But bringing beer to the equation makes the whole problem seem solved. People can go to any length for a drop of alcohol...