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For thousands of years, humans have gathered in the flickering firelight to ask an eternal question: "will it booze?" Alcoholic drinks are nearly ubiquitous across ancient human cultures, with many independently developing them at some point in time. You think drunk texts are bad? Imagine sending someone a drunk cave painting! We've made alcohol for religious rituals, food preservation, nutrition, medicine, and of course throwing lively parties! But which one was oldest? What was the first substance ever for which the answer to "will it booze?" was yes? Let's take a journey through the archaeology of alcohol to find the very oldest drink.
[intro] All of the beverages we're talking about today were made through fermentation by yeast and sometimes bacteria. If your favourite drink is a bit stronger, then it probably also involves distillation, which concentrates alcohol though evaporation and condensation. Distilled beverages aren't in the running for the oldest ever, though. While distillation to purify seawater goes back to Aristotle, it wasn't applied to alcohol until the 12th century. That's because reliably distilling alcohol requires sophisticated equipment that can withstand heat and a system to quickly cool the vapor down so it condenses.
We're aiming for older… way older. So please enjoy the following list, ranked not at all controversially by reverse order of age according to the availability of hard evidence for a beverage's existence. We begin our journey in Teotihuacan, the ancient city of pyramids located near modern day Mexico City. Teotihuacan lasted from 150 BCE to 650 CE and features murals appearing to depict people drinking pulque, a fermented beverage made from the sap of the agave plant. Archaeologists know that pulque holds great significance to people in the region all the way up to the modern day, but it was unclear when it originated.
So in 2014, researchers analyzed over 300 shards of pottery vessels from the city. Now the ancient alcohol itself was water soluble, so it would be pretty rare for it to stick around that long. But the porous clay of the pottery can absorb organic residues present in the liquids these vessels once held. Modern techniques like gas chromatography and mass spectrometry can pinpoint unique biomarkers in these residues. So instead of looking for the alcohol directly, researchers looked for a biomarker from a particular bacterium, Zymomonas mobilis.
Together with yeast, this is what produces ethanol during the agave fermentation process. The bacterium also produces a particular lipid in its cell membrane in order to protect itself from the alcoholic and low pH environment in which it lives. And that's exactly what they found on 14 of the shards, dated to between 200 and 550 CE. What's more, the same group of shards also had remnants of having been sealed with resin from a coniferous tree, an indication that something inside required a tight, waterproof seal. The researchers think pulque could have played an important role as a nutritional supplement in the city. While the occupants primarily ate corn and beans,
which can provide a reasonably balanced diet, when archaeologists examine skeletal remains they do see evidence of malnutrition, especially in lower-status residents. And the agave plant is significantly hardier than corn, so the researchers speculate it may have been an important source of nutrients through times of frost or drought. Pulque hosts probiotic bacteria and increases the absorption of iron from other sources. It can also be a particularly thick drink, so it may have helped give people the feeling of being full. The origins of the first cider are almost as hazy as… well, an unfiltered cider!
Apples were first domesticated in central Asia somewhere between 2,000 and 8,000 BCE, eventually making their way to Europe along the Silk Road. One of the first references to the drink comes from the Roman scientist Pliny the Elder who in 77 CE wrote down a big list of all the things you can make "wine" from. That list included apples and pears, so clearly cider! But it was wide ranging and clearly folks were accustomed to fermenting a wide array of things by this point in time, from pomegranates, to dates, figs, and even carob.
This is the oldest written evidence we have for cider. People could have been making cider as long as they had apples, but we don't know about it. Keep that in mind for this next entry. One of the simplest recipes from the same book by our friend Pliny was just water and honey, to make mead! Mead probably deserves a later spot on this list because of this simplicity. The yeast needed to create the fermentation naturally occurs in honey, so all you need to do is add water.
It may in fact be in the running to be the very oldest alcoholic beverage ever, and certainly goes back much further than Pliny's time. Many ancient cultures throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia independently developed some form of mead, clearly lots of our ancient relatives wanted to get their buzz on. But don't come for us in the comments on where we ranked this one! Or do. Follow your bliss Mead is this early because the direct evidence for it is tricky to find. Cave art from near Valencia, Spain dates back to around 6,000 BCE and depicts people collecting honey from a wild beehive.
Archaeologists have even found 40,000 year old beeswax collected by humans in a cave in South Africa. So we know humans have used and collected honey and beeswax for a long time, but there's a jump from that to the fermentation needed to make mead. It turns out the oldest evidence for mead is actually linguistic. There is a common linguistic root, *médʰu, reconstructed in the Proto-Indo-European language that is the common ancestor of English, Sanskrit, Greek, Polish, Slovenian, German, and many more. This root word not only went on to take the meaning of mead itself, but also has meant honey, sweet, intoxicating, and drunk in various languages.
Those multiple meanings suggest to linguists that the original root referred to not just honey, but the alcoholic beverage. It's thought that Proto-Indo-European was spoken somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 years ago, making mead at least that old. And it's probably older still, but it's difficult to put an exact date on it. The first definitive chemical evidence of a fermented rice beverage comes from around 7000 BCE in Jiahu, a settlement in northern China.
A 2004 study analyzed shards from 16 ancient pottery jars using a host of different techniques: from liquid chromatography, to infrared spectrometry, and stable isotope analysis. Putting the evidence from all of these together they found close matches to modern rice wine, grape wine, and beeswax. So they conclude these jars once contained a drink made from rice, honey, and some sort of fruit. So this could either be called the oldest direct evidence for mead because it included honey, or the oldest evidence for rice wine.
It's really kind of a mutt! In terms of the fruit, they specifically found tartaric acid - which points to grapes, so this could even be the first grape wine. But that's not conclusive, as tartaric acid could also have come from Chinese hawthorn. This beverage was probably something we wouldn't recognize today. But it sounds like it was pretty tasty! Okay, what about the earliest evidence for what we know for sure was grape wine? Well, wild grapes have likely been used as a food source since Paleolithic hunter-gatherer times, and they can even ferment by themselves on the vine. So not much human intervention is needed to get to wine.
Genetic analysis indicates humans domesticated both wine and table grapes right around the dawn of agriculture, roughly 9,000 BCE. But the oldest archaeological evidence for actually making pure grape wine goes back to 6,000 BCE in what is now the country of Georgia. Younger than the Jiahu drink… but we put it here because of the genetic evidence. A 2017 study figured this out by… you guessed it, finding organic molecules absorbed into clay pottery shards! These came from Neolithic settlements where each mudbrick house had around 55 liters worth of winemaking jars,
meaning this was already a large-scale production. Again, what the researchers actually found in the pottery was tartaric acid. But ancient grape pollen is widespread in the area, indicating grapes grew there at the right time. The researcher who led both this study and the study of Jiahu was Patrick McGovern, who was known as the Indiana Jones of alcohol. Throughout his career, his discoveries pushed back the date for the oldest known grape wine, three times! But despite that, wine, or at least grape wine, is still a long way off from the oldest booze.
The oldest archaeological evidence we have for fermented alcoholic beverages is… you've probably guessed based on the fact that we haven't covered it yet… beer! First figuring out how to make beer probably happened in a few steps. When grain gets wet, it becomes sweet as enzymes convert starch into maltose sugar, a process known as malting. This likely led to the discovery of porridge. But leave that out too long, and wild yeast from the air settles, starting fermentation. From this point, you can go in one of two directions: beer or bread. In fact, there's a debate amongst archaeologists
around whether grain agriculture was first developed to support beer production or bread production. Some early beer recipes used bread as an ingredient, suggesting bread came first. But others have argued that early wild cereals were better for beer making than for bread making. A 2007 study mapped the genetic diversity of yeast strains and found that bread strains sit between beer and wine, so another point in favor of beer. This chicken and egg question is still up for scientists to debate over a few drinks. You could say the evidence for it is still brewing.
What we do know is the evidence for the first beer goes all the way back to 11,000 BCE. A 2018 study examined a Natufian burial site in a cave in what is now northern Israel. Brewing at 11,000 BCE is astonishing, as it predates pottery in the region. I mean, where did they put it? Answer: the floor. They used stone mortars carved into boulders or the cave floor for storing and processing grain. The researchers found starch granules, fibres, and small silica structures from plants called phytoliths inside these mortars,
but almost none of these elsewhere in the cave. And they found five starch granules that were damaged in a way that is consistent with being soaked in water: evidence of malting. This is also thousands of years older than domesticated cereals in this region, so the Natufians were collecting wild grains to brew with. Which certainly gives weight to the idea that brewing beer might have been the original motivation behind farming grain. But it doesn't settle that debate. A different 2018 study found remains of ancient charred brea d at another Natufian site in what is today Jordan.
This could be even slightly older, dating to 12,400 BCE. The next possible evidence for brewing beer comes from Göbekli Tepe, in what is today Turkey, at around 9000 BCE. There it may have played a pivotal role in the dawn of feasting culture. Feasting is about more than a good party. It forges alliances, strengthens a group's coherence, and establishes social structures. All important in the development of early cities and societies. Eventually, beer appeared in many corners of the ancient world from barley beer in China at 3000 BCE, to the first industrial scale brewery in Egypt around the same time,
to chicha, a corn beer brewed in Peru from around 600 CE. But it does seem like the Natufians were a few pints ahead of everyone else! While beer is the earliest evidence for humans brewing alcohol, it may not have been the first alcohol our ancestors drank. Primates gained the ability to metabolize ethanol 10 million years ago and even today, humans aren't the only species to take advantage of this. The sap of the palm tree can ferment naturally, becoming up to 6.9% alcohol by volume without much human intervention. A 2015 study looked at 17 years of chimpanzee observations in West Africa and found they repeatedly drink fermented palm sap,
even using leaves as tools to extract the sap from the trees. This is similar to palm wine, a drink made from the same sap that has a long history going back at least to ancient Egypt and probably also Palestine. While there isn't direct archaeological evidence of humans consuming palm wine earlier than this, there is speculation that the drink is much older. The catch is that palm wine doesn't leave much in terms of physical evidence for archeologists to find thousands of years later.
Booze has played the role of a nutritional supplement during times of crop failure. It has brought people together and acted as a social lubricant to forge alliances. And it may have even helped along other fundamental technologies like crop domestication and agriculture. So while it's fun to imagine our ancestors were making questionable decisions long before history could record them, the truth is booze wasn't just a drink, it was a cutting edge technology. [outro]
