When Did Ancient Humans Start Drinking Alcohol?

When Did Ancient Humans Start Drinking Alcohol? 13,000 years ago, before anyone had planted a single field, hunter-gatherers in a cave on Mount Carmel were brewing a thick, sour drink for their dead. But the story starts millions of years earlier — in a fruit tree. Wild chimps still "drink" every day without trying, and your body carries a 10-million-year-old upgrade built for exactly that. So why do we keep doing this? The answer isn't the alcohol. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 Saturday Morning 0:14 Rewind 13,000 Years 0:40 The Official Story Was Wrong 1:23 The Puzzle 1:57 Guess Who Drank Today 3:31 One Day in a Stone Age Brewery 4:50 The 10-Million-Year-Old Enzyme 6:21 China, Georgia & the First Wine 7:31 What Keeps You Alive? 8:09 Why We Drink Together 9:13 The Whole Picture 9:28 How Drinking Became a Business 10:49 It Was Never About the Alcohol All research and sources are linked below. 📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES: ▸ Earliest evidence of brewing, ~13,000 years ago — "Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel: Investigating Natufian ritual feasting", Liu et al. (2018, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2018... ▸ The "bread or beer" debate — "Did Man Once Live by Beer Alone?", Braidwood et al. (1953, American Anthropologist 55(4): 515–526) ▸ Wild chimps eat ~14 g of alcohol a day in fruit — "Ethanol ingestion via frugivory in wild chimpanzees", Maro, Dudley et al. (2025, Science Advances) https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adw1665 ▸ Chimps drinking palm wine with leaf sponges in Bossou, Guinea — Hockings et al. (2015, Royal Society Open Science) ▸ The ADH4 enzyme became 40× better at metabolizing alcohol ~10 million years ago — "Hominids adapted to metabolize ethanol long before human-directed fermentation", Carrigan et al. (2015, PNAS) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1404167111 ▸ 9,000-year-old rice, honey and fruit drink from Jiahu, China — "Fermented beverages of pre- and proto-historic China", McGovern et al. (2004, PNAS) ▸ Oldest known grape wine, Georgia, ~6000–5800 BC — "Early Neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus", McGovern et al. (2017, PNAS) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1714728114 ▸ Social drinking, friendship and endorphins — "Functional Benefits of (Modest) Alcohol Consumption", Dunbar et al. (2017, Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology) https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-016-00... ▸ Pyramid-builders' bread and beer rations — Joyce Tyldesley, "The Private Lives of the Pyramid-builders" (BBC History, 2011) ▸ Tavern laws 108–109 — The Code of Hammurabi, c. 1750 BC (trans. L. W. King) ▸ Natufian way of life — "The Natufian Culture in the Levant, Threshold to the Origins of Agriculture", Ofer Bar-Yosef (1998, Evolutionary Anthropology) ———————————————————— PEOPLE & SITES MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO: ▸ Raqefet Cave (Mount Carmel, Israel) — a Natufian graveyard with about 30 burials. Stone mortars carved into its floor hold the oldest known traces of brewing. ▸ Natufians — semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers of the Levant who harvested wild cereals thousands of years before farming. ▸ Li Liu (Stanford University) — archaeologist who led the Raqefet study; she was looking for plant foods, not alcohol. ▸ Robert Braidwood — archaeologist who in 1953 hosted the famous "bread or beer?" debate on why people first grew grain. ▸ Aleksey Maro & Robert Dudley (UC Berkeley) — measured alcohol in wild chimpanzee fruit; Dudley is the author of the "drunken monkey" hypothesis. ▸ Kimberley Hockings — primatologist whose team documented wild chimps in Bossou, Guinea, drinking fermented palm sap with leaf sponges. ▸ Matthew Carrigan — biologist who resurrected ancient ADH4 enzymes and dated our alcohol upgrade to ~10 million years ago. ▸ Patrick McGovern (Penn Museum) — biomolecular archaeologist behind the Jiahu and Georgian wine discoveries. ▸ Jiahu (Henan, China) — Neolithic village where 9,000-year-old jars held a fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit. ▸ Gadachrili Gora (Georgia) — Neolithic village south of Tbilisi with the oldest known grape wine. ▸ Robin Dunbar (University of Oxford) — psychologist who links social drinking, endorphins and friendship. ▸ Hammurabi — king of Babylon whose law code, carved in stone around 1750 BC, regulated taverns. ————————————————————