Otherwise known as “What came first: beer or bread?”
I think this is known as the McGovern hypothesis, that grain by itself wasn’t enough to tilt culture to the direction of sedentary agriculturalism … That it was craving for alcohol that was the incentive.
How sound is this theory?
One problem I would have with the theory is that there are tribes out there who know how to make alcohol without grain or agriculture. One Amazon tribe smashes up fruit, mixes in a little spit (with natural yeast) and lets it ferment.
Maybe grain is a better and more reliable source for alcohol, but it’s a better and more reliable source of all kinds of things.
Considering that alcohol doesn’t play a significant part in American civilizations (there were a few alcoholic drinks among the American groups, like pulque, but they were by no means everywhere, or important where they did exist), I’d say that alcohol probably wasn’t the impetus for civilization to exist.
as I’ve noted before, I’m surprised that alcohol wasn’t a bigger deal in the americas – there’s no shortage of fruits that could be fermented (including labrusca grapes, which make perfectly good wine), and you can certainly make liquor from corn. I don’t buy that “they just never discovered it.”
You’re comparing apples and oranges, the Amazon is a very different enviroment than the ancient middle east and Africa. If you have fruit available almost year round there would be less drive to cultivate grain.
I’ve often wondered what role drugs other than alcohol, and drug use and addiction played in the start of agriculture and civilization. You can hunt and gather year round different things and survive, but can you find enough wild opium poppy pods or marijuana to support a habit? We know these plants were used and grown going back 10,000 years, they would make good trade items too.
The first evidence of alcohol was in the fertile crescent, where grains and cereal were discovered. Alcohol at that time was discovered, not invented. Basically, they had an abundance of barley they could store, and when they stored it, there was no way of stopping the moisture from fermenting the stock. Bread, on the other hand, had to take a lot of trial and error before the steps from grain to dough to baking came down to consistency.
I recommend reading History of the World in Six Glasses. It will answer all your questions about why different cultures have different drinks of choice in addition to your beer question.
ETA: Nevermind :smack:
There is a streaming documentary available on Netflix called How Beer Saved the World. I watched it tonight. It ties just about every important innovation in ancient history back to beer but it seemed overreaching at best to me. It gives a jumping off point to think about this subject however. BTW, they give evidence that beer came well before bread by several thousand years.
But wasn’t the Amazon Basin a very different place itself several thousand years ago ?
There are artifacts that might indicate that rather then being a rainforest it more savannah like.
This isn’t written in stone but is a distinct possibility.
The earliest evidence for fermented drinks from grains will of course come from places where grains were first cultivated, if you are looking for grain-based alcohol, you will only find it where it is grown. That leads to a false positive. So saying that the earliest remains of beer come from the fertile crescent isn’t saying much. You also have the difficulty that few containers survive from a time when ceramics were in their infancy, most were organic themselves and have been lost. And even then only a small portion of the ceramics are tested for traces of their contents. Merely saying one has the first known example of something is not the same as saying ‘here it began’, by a long way, especially in prehistory. But fermented honey- or mead- is traceable back into the mesolithic, and quite possibly further as cave art in Spain from at least 10,000 B.P depicts honey being used. Honey can be stored for a long time, (hence its usefulness) and would become fermented easily. Perhaps they were literally ‘drawing on’ their inspiration? 
One of the earliest recipes we know of was for beer.
Actually, cauim, the beverage made by the indians is obtained by chewing and spitting manioc, not fruits. manioc is definitively a cultivated root.
Also a lot of fruit will ferment on their own, even still on the plant. No spit required.
The spit is not used to provide cultures for fermentation. The spit is used for the enzymes (amalyse is one) in it that break down starches into simpler sugars. More simple sugars yield more alcohol.