When Did Humans Start Drinking Alcohol?

#WhyWeDrink #HistoryOfBeer #humanevolution When Did Humans Start Drinking Alcohol? Long before farming, cities or writing, humans were already drinking. In this video, we follow the story of alcohol from a rotting fruit on a forest floor 10 million years ago to a 13,000-year-old beer brewed in a cave full of graves, giant stone temples built for feasting, workers paid in beer, and a goddess stopped by seven thousand jars of it. And at the end, why that ancient instinct still pulls on you today. In this video: The tiny jungle animal that drinks fermented nectar every night The "Drunken Monkey" hypothesis: why our ancestors followed the smell of alcohol The 10-million-year-old gene mutation that let us digest it What alcohol actually does to your brain and body Raqefet Cave: possibly the oldest beer ever found Göbekli Tepe and the idea that monuments were built for feasts "Did Man Once Live by Beer Alone?" The beer-before-bread debate The world's oldest known alcohol recipe from Jiahu, China Beer goddesses, tavern laws and pyramid workers paid in beer The Egyptian myth of Sekhmet and the beer that saved humanity Why the ancient Greeks watered down their wine The "alcohol flush" and the genes behind it Why your brain is still tuned for a world of rotting fruit Chapters: 0:00 The animal that drinks every night 0:40 The drunken monkey 2:10 What alcohol does to you 3:05 Beer in a cave of graves 4:05 A temple built for feasting? 5:05 Beer before bread? 5:50 The first recipe and the first laws 6:50 The beer that saved humanity 8:05 Greeks and the red-faced gene 9:05 A 10-million-year-old instinct What's the strangest drinking tradition in your family or country? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe for more stories about the hidden history of everyday things. ────────── Sources: Wiens et al. — Chronic intake of fermented floral nectar by wild treeshrews, PNAS, 2008 Robert Dudley — The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol, University of California Press, 2014 Carrigan et al. — Hominids adapted to metabolize ethanol long before human-directed fermentation, PNAS, 2015 Liu et al. — Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2018 Dietrich et al. — The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities: new evidence from Göbekli Tepe, Antiquity, 2012 Braidwood et al. — Did Man Once Live by Beer Alone?, American Anthropologist, 1953 McGovern et al. — Fermented beverages of pre- and proto-historic China, PNAS, 2004 Patrick McGovern — Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and