Connecting some threads here with some hypotheses …
One hypothesis of more recent popularity is that the beginnings of agriculture was less to grow grain for food than to grow it to brew into beer.
This article is one of the cornerstones of that hypothesis, demonstrating that the culture that developed and spread farming in the Fertile Crescent, the early Natufian culture, very likely was more about growing grain for brewing beer than for food. Alcohol was clearly known and enjoyed among even simple HG groups but making it was something that only began with more complex HG groups that were at least semi-sedentary. Within those groups it apparently served a role for feasts and sacred rituals, occasions that helped develop more complex social structures and intergroup alliances. Within those complex HG societies grains were collect and transported great distances, clearly valued far more than for their caloric value:
Note the relationship suggested between complex HG society inequality, brewing, feasting, and early agriculture emerging. It may be that inequality caused agriculture at least as much as agriculture caused inequality.
There is also a not overly strained parallel to make here between brewing alcohol and eventually distillation technologies with written language: both apparently were inventions developed out of social structures that were getting increasingly complex and that required a certain level of social complexity to emerge, and both were used tools that fostered increased societal complexity. And if we accept lynne-42’s thesis, both may be associated with individuals not remembering as much!
