The secret life of brewers yeast (book)

[Stew8]

Hi
I’ve just read a quirky, nerdy, historic and anecdotal filled book written by an American microbiologist finding about about brewers yeast in Egypt and Germany. It’s not for everyone but I found it fascinating. David Wooster, the author writes well. I have learned a lot about yeast and found even more about distilling and the effect of yeasts have on flavour. I’d now like a microscope......

Back to the book, I read it on kindle and it was inexpensive to buy. If you’re on the unlimited I think it’s free.

For one addendum is copied below
Since drinking beer or wine was safer than river water, modern humans have evolved to metabolize alcohol better than our pre-civilized ancestors could. In this way, the yeast is said to have altered the distribution of genes in the human population, allowing us to live in cities necessary for the Industrial Revolution. (i.e. a modern human could probably beat Neanderthal in a drinking contest)

[Birrofilo]

For one addendum is copied below
Since drinking beer or wine was safer than river water, modern humans have evolved to metabolize alcohol better than our pre-civilized ancestors could. In this way, the yeast is said to have altered the distribution of genes in the human population, allowing us to live in cities necessary for the Industrial Revolution. (i.e. a modern human could probably beat Neanderthal in a drinking contest)

This sounds quite unscientific to me.
First, thinking that a cultural habit has had the time to operate a natural selection in so short a time is, I think, very very much unlikely. That would be the only case of selection due to cultural habits that I know, but I don't think at all the theory would stand any scientific examination.

The second reason is that, unless the author has some other kind of selection different from the one developed by Darwin, the drinking of alcohol should have had two simultaneous consequences:
a) He would have killed many for too much alcohol consumption, thus eliminating those with unfit body for heavy drinking. Imagine that, selection by ethilic coma;
b) At the same time, it would have given an advantage in comparison to teetotaller, increasing the probabilities of the drunkard to reproduce himself in comparison to the probability of the tee-totaller to reproduce himself.

So our ancestors drank near to kill themselves, but those who did not kill themselves survived and passed along their specific wine resistance, and survived better than those drinking water instead.

If you satisfy your thirst with beer or wine instead of water you spend your life constantly drunk. Imagine our ancestors having to fight against enemies, ferocius animals, and building civilizations while being constantly drunk, and all this to be immune from dissenteria. Would they last as an animal group, or as a cultural group?

Finally, some human races descend from people who had no notion of alcohol (think Eskimos) since prehistoric times. I doubt those to have less resistance - given the same cultural environment - than our Homo europaeus in drinking. But who knows...

Not a very brilliant theory in my opinion: too short time, unclear selection mechanism, and clear disadvantage in being always drunk.

[Stew8]

interesting views, my advice is not to read the book as it’s not a scientific journal.

There is some truth to the genetics tolerance to alcohol; apparently in the West beer and wine was consumed more than the east where tea was drunk; both options safer to drink than water. There is an intolerance to alcohol by some people where their faces go bright red. Apparently it’s more common with folk from Asian decent than European. Not scientific but interesting https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/disea ... ensitivity

In German, beer is seen as food and beer vending machines are common place in offices and some factories.
“Until 2009, it was acceptable for employees in many fields of work (especially construction workers, gardeners and the like) to consume medium quantities of alcohol during work hours. However, occupational safety legislation has since tightened down and has induced a significant decrease of alcohol consumption during work hours.” (Wikipedia)

in Africa beer give nutrients and vitamins that prevent kwashiorkor, prevalent in malnourished children until they reach the age to drink beer, normally sorghum based and pretty weak.

[badflash]

I strongly suggest you watch the documentary "How Beer Saved the World". It is on YouTube and Netflix. Beer pre-dates civilization, and is actually responsible for civilization, reading writing and mathematics in order to keep track of it. Agriculture developed exclusively to grow grain. Beer predates bread by nearly 2000 years. 20,000 years is plenty of time to select for alcohol tolerance. Witness the intolerance shown by cultures such as Native Americans who did not evolve with beer.
http://www.documentarytube.com/videos/h ... -the-world" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

[The Baker]

....
There is some truth to the genetics tolerance to alcohol; apparently in the West beer and wine was consumed more than the east where tea was drunk; both options safer to drink than water. There is an intolerance to alcohol by some people where their faces go bright red. Apparently it’s more common with folk from Asian decent than European. Not scientific but interesting https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/disea ... ensitivity

....

I took a couple of visiting Chinese girls to lunch at a winery.
One said she did not drink wine and I said, would you like just a taste?
And with literally a taste, from a splash in her glass, her face went red.

Geoff

P.S. In times past, the poorest of the Chinese drank just hot water. In a book by the famous author Pearl Buck, when the wife sprinkled a little tea on the hot water the father-in-law said that was like wasting handfuls of silver. G.

[Birrofilo]

I strongly suggest you watch the documentary "How Beer Saved the World". It is on YouTube and Netflix. Beer pre-dates civilization, and is actually responsible for civilization, reading writing and mathematics in order to keep track of it. Agriculture developed exclusively to grow grain. Beer predates bread by nearly 2000 years. 20,000 years is plenty of time to select for alcohol tolerance. Witness the intolerance shown by cultures such as Native Americans who did not evolve with beer.
http://www.documentarytube.com/videos/h ... -the-world" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

I begun seeing it but I stopped at the "beer invented writing" stuff.
Yes scientists debate whether the first reason for agriculture was beer or bread.
And yes, microbiology starts from beer studies (I suppose the documentary certainly is going to touch that point).

There is a clear product placement at the beginning and this "documentary" is the typical low quality product that is often found on Discovery Channel. Actually in this case it is clearly a "lobby documentary" or even single firm documentary.

Don't misunderstand me. I love beer and I homebrew my own. I am a beer devotee. I am a homebrewer who is beginning distilling.

In order to have a selection of genes from one generation to another you have to have, er, a selection. Which means somebody does not reproduce himself and doesn't pass on his genetical code.
In Darwinian terms you cannot explain how drinking beers improves your genetic ability to digest it, if you don't find a "selection" mechanism. Somebody must die, so to speak.

Evolution is survival of the fittest. Being "fit" means having more probabilities to reproduce your genes, being "unfit" means having less probabilities to reproduce them.
I don't see any selection mechanism at work here. I don't see how getting drunk later helps your survival

@Stew8 alcohol is consumed in Asia since millennia, I don't know who consumed it first between European (let's say the Greek-Romans) and the Chinese. The only population that went into contact with alcohol thanks to the European explorers, for what I know, were North-American Indians (and Eskimos). Maybe Australians aboriginals also did not know alcoholic drinks, but I am not sure.
Everywhere the European explorers set foot, in Africa, Asia, and all Americas from the South up to Mexico, they found alcohol-drinking populations.

Certainly "beer" was one of the basic food for most of ancient humanity.

But, again, South Americans eat corn, potatoes, beans and tomatoes since tenth of years before the European man, and they don't digest them better than us. We eat potatoes and tomatoes since birth and so are well "trained" to deal with that food.
By the same token, we don't digest chickpeas better than Mexicans.

[badflash]

You need to watch the rest of it and just have fun. Genetic selection in civilized nations of Europe is quite simple. If you did not drink beer, you died. Men, women and children had to drink beer because the water was unfit to drink. If you could not function with a moderate buzz, you were not employable. Your children ended up sick or dead or not at all. That looks like selection to me.
Your potatoes and tomatoes proves my point. There is no selection. Just because a food is available does not mean eating it is an advantage and there are other foods that are available. When food is plentiful and easily digestible already, why would digesting it better make any difference?
If you want to see natural selection in food, look at milk and white skin. People need vitamin D. As people migrated north there was not enough sunlight to make D through dark skin. Only lighter skin people could produce offspring unless they had a source of D with them. If you had milk animals, that fixed it, or if you ate animals rich in D, which was more difficult. If you were lactose intolerant, you had a big issue.

[kiwi Bruce]

a modern human could probably beat Neanderthal in a drinking contest [/i]

Done this lots of times, they're fun to hang out with...conversation is a bit "dull" if you know what I mean...good to have around if it comes to a brawl...but they can't drink for shi#. Ten pints a best bitter and they're done.

[kiwi Bruce]

If you want to see natural selection in food, look at milk and white skin. People need vitamin D. As people migrated north there was not enough sunlight to make D through dark skin. Only lighter skin people could produce offspring unless they had a source of D with them. If you had milk animals, that fixed it, or if you ate animals rich in D, which was more difficult. If you were lactose intolerant, you had a big issue.

This was all undone by a french scientist in the 1960's Corentin Louis Kervran, but this can't be posted here... I'll try to start a new tread.

[badflash]

Yes scientists debate whether the first reason for agriculture was beer or bread.

Any scientist that would debate this point would be pretty ignorant. Beer predates bread by over 2000 years in any of the more recent archeological findings. The first bread was made from spent grain by some ingenious wife.

Yes, pasteurization was not invented to preserve milk. Pasteur was funded by Beer to find a way to preserve it. Refrigeration was invented and funded by beer to make Lager. Life, as we know it, would not exist without beer.

Civilization was started by men. Before cities and agriculture, men hunted to provide food. Women gathered, and that would include the grain needed to make beer. I can't imagine any man giving up hunting and planning a year in advance so his wife could bake bread. Would that make sense to you? I can see men creating agriculture in order to have enough grain to make beer though. Look what we do today to make beer, wine and build a still. When was the last time you made a loaf of bread?

It is similar to the lie we've been taught about the reason for prohibition. Supposedly prohibition was a bone thrown to the women for helping us win the war. When the 18th Amendment was passed, women did not have the right to vote. Can you imagine men voting to give up alcohol to say thank you to the women involved in the Temperance movement? Have you even seen the posters showing those gals? Barf.

The truth is that the Temperance Movement was funded by the oil companies. The first cars ran on alcohol, not gasoline. Gasoline was a by-product of heating and lighting oil and the oil companies needed to find a market for it. They talked Henry Ford into making the Model T run on both alcohol and gas, but no one wanted to buy it because it made their cars stink, and it was poisonous and dangerous. The solution was to get the government to make alcohol illegal. The Temperance Movement was just a cover story.

Once cars no longer ran on alcohol, Prohibition was revoked, but the taxes on alcohol remained until Jimmy Carter, which made it too expensive to use as a fuel.

[Birrofilo]

Well, I am not scientist myself, but I read the "bread" party generally wins over the "beer" party (we homebrewers have a slightly skewed vision on the subject ). Archaeologic findings can move the needle on both sides, we aren't done with archaeological findings, new discoveries might make us think differently.

Some pre-historic and pre-agricultural populations in South America were known to travel long distances to go to places where they could find abundant fermentable grains. They would stay some week as as kind of an "holiday", get drunk as much as they could, and then go back home. Basically they invented the Balearic Islands millennia before Germans and Britons

Beer is probably older than agriculture, but how can we weight what is the "reason" to cultivate land? It might be bread, or beer, or fruit, or vegetables, or the need to stay near the tombs of the ancestors, or the need to keep an eye on your woman rather than going away for days while somebody else entertains her.

If you build some fortification for the safety of your community, then agriculture begins being much more interesting than raising cattle. No need to force the "reason" for agriculture as being beer or bread.

I am not convinced a human being can really satisfy his water need by drinking alcoholic beverages. If you don't drink water because it is unsafe, you eat food containing water (fruit, and water-rich vegetables). I don't believe in a permanently drunk prehistoric humanity, the patch can be worse than the hole.

Besides, mankind drank water for hundred thousand years, and - in the hypothesis - switched to "safer" beer in the last 6000 - 10.000 years or so, and in so doing they should have acquired a much higher survivability. Not convincing to me.

Regarding prohibition, human stupidity and religious fundamentalism is reason enough to make such a stupid thing. No doubts some lobbies would have lobbied in favour, but some other not less important lobbies (brewers, wine producers, distillers, saloon owners etc.) would lobby against. Ultimately I think human stupidity and "easy solution to difficult problems" is the culprit.

Just like the recent stupidity of thinking that obesity is due to "junk food", with related crusade and witch hunt. Junk food doesn't exist, only "junk diets" exist.

PS My last loaf of bread is actually more recent than my last batch of beer, I like making solid bread as well the liquid one.

[badflash]

Why would a man go from a hunter gatherer to agrarian? Bread is certainly no reason, but beer is. You make a big assumption about society and the need to know who your papa is. Hunter-gathering people often don't care. Take a look at the customs of the Inuit. All of those thing you list come after people live in settlements. The transition from something you know, to something that requires long range planning does not come easily.

When beer is made the original way you get 2 runnings. The first run it high beer, the second is low beer. Low beer is pretty low in alcohol and does not keep well. This was used for children and drinking during the day.

Yes, science is always moving forward, but the current evidence is pretty conclusive. There have been many finds of brewing jugs from some of the very earliest finds. They know these were used for brewing because of the beerstone deposits. In these early villages there was no evidence of the tools needed to bake bread. The early cuneiform tablets talk about beer, but not bread. They also talk about workers being paid in beer.

Once cities grew to a size that sanitation became a problem, access to clean water became a huge issue. You see that in Africa today and many other primitive societies. Too many people pollute the water with human sewage. They didn't understand germ theory and that boiling water would fix it. They knew that drinking beer did not make them sick. If you read the logs of the Mayflower, you will find that the landing on Cape Cod was not the original destination. They ran out of beer and had no idea that water in the New World could be safely consumed. They quickly made beer from acorns. The connection between beer and life in old cities is well established. Cultural taboos prevent it from being common knowledge. This isn't theory, it is history. There are written records, not just stuffed pieced together from broken pot shards.

As far as human stupidity, there is no shortage of that, but I have never understood the linkage between tea totaling and Christianity. Jesus drank, and is well known for converting water to wine. That must have been divine wine!

[The Baker]

badflash said, 'As far as human stupidity, there is no shortage of that, but I have never understood the linkage between tea totalling and Christianity. ...'

It was a thing about the welfare of society. About class and the workers, perhaps, especially.
And the industrial revolution had a lot to do with it.
The rich people drank more wine and spirits (and beer too).But the workers drank beer, and a lot of it in many cases.
Often they would get drunk in the pub, leaving not enough money for food for the family; then stagger home and beat the wife and often the kids too.
So beer was available and it was the drug of choice and the social evil of its day.
And religions that were aware of the welfare of the poor, perhaps the Salvation Army especially, were against alcohol.

Geoff

[Birrofilo]

Why would a man go from a hunter gatherer to agrarian? Bread is certainly no reason, but beer is. You make a big assumption about society and the need to know who your papa is. Hunter-gathering people often don't care. Take a look at the customs of the Inuit. All of those thing you list come after people live in settlements. The transition from something you know, to something that requires long range planning does not come easily.

When beer is made the original way you get 2 runnings. The first run it high beer, the second is low beer. Low beer is pretty low in alcohol and does not keep well. This was used for children and drinking during the day.

Yes, science is always moving forward, but the current evidence is pretty conclusive. There have been many finds of brewing jugs from some of the very earliest finds. They know these were used for brewing because of the beerstone deposits. In these early villages there was no evidence of the tools needed to bake bread. The early cuneiform tablets talk about beer, but not bread. They also talk about workers being paid in beer.

Once cities grew to a size that sanitation became a problem, access to clean water became a huge issue. You see that in Africa today and many other primitive societies. Too many people pollute the water with human sewage. They didn't understand germ theory and that boiling water would fix it. They knew that drinking beer did not make them sick. If you read the logs of the Mayflower, you will find that the landing on Cape Cod was not the original destination. They ran out of beer and had no idea that water in the New World could be safely consumed. They quickly made beer from acorns. The connection between beer and life in old cities is well established. Cultural taboos prevent it from being common knowledge. This isn't theory, it is history. There are written records, not just stuffed pieced together from broken pot shards.

As far as human stupidity, there is no shortage of that, but I have never understood the linkage between tea totaling and Christianity. Jesus drank, and is well known for converting water to wine. That must have been divine wine!

I am reading now "Drink: a cultural history of alcohol" by Iain Gately. Yes it says that American water was deemed unsafe in general. We still don't understand what would push the ancient to boil beer. The "old way" of making beer does not require boiling. Yet it seems it was boiled. Beer was considered safer than water by some, but so was gin.
Many affirmation in that would are "debatable", sometimes the author jumps to simplistic conclusions.

Your connection about the need, or lack thereof, of knowing who are your children can be read the other way round: cities are born because they allow you control over your woman. The idea that jealousy is born "culturally" and is related to living in town is, again, not convincing to me. If I don't have the need to control who fecondates my woman as a shepherd, why should I need to know it when I am a bricklayer? What is there, in living in town, that makes mankind jealous? I.e. what is the cause, what is the effect? I would bet jealousy predates not just cities, but also agriculture and also beer by a long stretch, even if it was less "enforceable"

Cereals can be consumed without grinding them. Consumption of cereals as solid "dry" food is certainly anterior to beer. What makes you think that in order to decide to cultivate land, in order to obtain cereals, people have to consume them in form of bread? They can consume it in form of grains, as mankind does since pre-pre-prehistory. Cereals are food, and agriculture provides food. Cereals can keep for years, bread cannot. Cereals can be stockable to combat draughts and famine, beer cannot.

The book has a nice chapter or two about prohibitionism and "temperance leagues" in the UK, in the USA, in Canada, in Australia. It shows the slow "progress" of the USA into federal-level prohibition (a process which lasted decades) and its ineffectiveness both at the state level (many states were prohibitionists at some level much before 1919, but always failed to enforce the prohibition) and at federal level.
It shows very well the relation between religion and prohibitionism: the "temperance leagues" were always animated by religious groups. The book makes a very interesting observation: Catholic countries never had prohibitionists movements, because wine is used in the mass and is deeply entrenched into the culture.

Prohibitionism only took place in mostly Protestant countries (USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Finland) because Protestants don't believe in transubstanciation and this makes the wine less of a taboo object. There might be some ground in this observation. (Although I think that the most important factor is a certain Protestant tendency to "improve the world", "fingerpoint" and "police society", which is absent in Catholic countries where "mind your own business" rules. Protestants would not accept having a pastor with an illicit relationship. Catholic would actually help the priest in the cover-up . The normal priest would preach: "do as I say, don't do as I do" ).

Also, woman were at the forefront of this anti-alcohol histeria, partly because they were not part of the alcohol culture (woman were generally not allowed in saloons, and were generally not supposed to drink spirits). With Prohibition all this changed: alcoholic beverages were served (under the table) in all sort of public venues and that opened the way to the idea of women drinking spirits in public.

[Birrofilo]

badflash said, 'As far as human stupidity, there is no shortage of that, but I have never understood the linkage between tea totalling and Christianity. ...'

It was a thing about the welfare of society. About class and the workers, perhaps, especially.
And the industrial revolution had a lot to do with it.
The rich people drank more wine and spirits (and beer too).But the workers drank beer, and a lot of it in many cases.
Often they would get drunk in the pub, leaving not enough money for food for the family; then stagger home and beat the wife and often the kids too.
So beer was available and it was the drug of choice and the social evil of its day.
And religions that were aware of the welfare of the poor, perhaps the Salvation Army especially, were against alcohol.

Geoff

Actually beer was expensive, as a way to get drunk, in comparison to spirits. Some semi-prohibitionist attempts tried to divert consumption from spirits to beer. Brewers were in certain cases behind this effort.
Spirits have always been not just the faster, but the cheaper way to get drunk.
The poorest would drink spirits rather than beer.
It was a layered society:
spirits were the only "drink" of the destitute, the very poor; beer of the working to middle-class; wine of the middle-class to rich.

For decades, from the Appalachians to the West Coast, only spirits existed: there was no beer or wine production and the distances were such that beer and wine would not keep. Alcohol and spirits have been synonyms for most of the USA or Canada or Australia for decades.

[The Baker]

Ah, yes. I had forgotten 'mother's ruin', the cheap gin apparently readily available in those times.

Geoff

[Birrofilo]

Also I keep reading that Sumers and/or Egyptians paid workers in beers, that's another absurdity.
In order to be a currency, the object which is used as currency must be small, easy to transport, with a high "specific value", and not perishable. Beer is certainly totally unfit to be used as wage.

Imagine a manual worker having painstakingly laboured for an entire day and being told, at the end of the working day: fine, now get your 20 litres of beer in practical 5 litre-amphorae to bring home. You will be able to pay the baker and the prostitute with that. Yes, of course.
That, while saying that people drank beer instead of water, i.e. beer is not something special or rare, but the commonest of commodities.

I understand that writings show people receiving "beer" as wage, but that was certainly no more "beer" than modern Britons receive, ehr, pounds. "Beer" was the name of the currency, whatever the currency was. A standard unity of currency buys a standard unit of beer and therefore you call it "beer". Or you receive a token that gives right to you to a standard unit of beer and then it circulates as a currency, because it is exchangeable in beer, but that doesn't mean that beer is actually used as pay, only as figurative money.

So you can say "I am paid 20 beers per day" but that doesn't mean that I am paid with the actual liquid. By the same token, Danish people are not paid in crowns, and pesos are actually not heavy at all.

[badflash]

Transportability is not a requirement, at least not in the way you think. Money, in general is pretty new. Bartering was how it was done for a very long time. The evidence that workers were paid in beer is not up for debate. It is well documented. They were not paid exclusively in beer, but they were paid in beer.

In a hunter gatherer society, the concept of marriage may not exist. Children are raised by a group of mothers and are protected by a group of men. The Chief has rights to all the women, as you go down the pecking order, sexual privileges become less and less. You can see this in many simian cultures such as chimps. Once you build a town you end up inventing ownership, and women become property. Once you are expected to provide for your own children, you start to worry about if they are yours or not. Being genetically related to children is not a requirement to love or protect them, anyway. I have already raised one to adulthood that was not mine, and I am in the process of raising another. Jealousy is trained and comes from the concept of property.

[badflash]

The reason whiskey was cheap is that it could be stored for long periods of time. Farmers converted their corn and grain into whiskey, rather than trying to store it and protect it fro vermin. Beer was much more bulky and didn't keep well, and had to be made from grains like barley that were harder to grow than corn, making it more expensive as well. Much easier to store a gallon of whiskey vs. a Keg of beer as well.

As to eating whole grain, good luck with that. In one end and out the other, nearly unchanged. It must be soaked in order to be palatable at all. No one is going to develop agriculture for that sort of payout. It was probably the soaking of the grain that led to the invention of beer though. Soak it and forget about it and you make a crude beer. After that first buzz, agriculture is just around the corner.

[jonnys_spirit]

After that first buzz, agriculture is just around the corner.

This doesnt take eight+ years of college to figure out. In those days brewers, chefs, vintners, and distillers were like magicians. It smell so good! They make a party in your mouth, they fill your belly, they make sex even better, and they make everything funny.

I ordered the book.

Cheers,
-j

[Birrofilo]

I continue to differ, e.g. in this, that you can soak grain prior to eating them, but not prior to storing them, you can store them dry and they will last for years. So I stand my point that grains are much, much more interesting, as food and as storage of food, than beer (and yes, soaking them can lead to "discovery" of beer, but that doesn't mean that beer is more important than proper food).

Grains are very interesting as food for hunters/gatherers because they can be chewed, for ours, in your mouth up to digestion, that was known to the Romans as digestio in ore, and it was normally practised by armies during long transfers and forced marches.

Normally what is given as "demonstration" that beer was the main aim of agriculture rather than "bread" is that the preferred cereal was barley and not wheat (barley being more "brewable" than wheat, and wheat being more "breadable" than barley). But that, again, it's an arbitrary conclusion: barley is easier to grow than wheat, it's more tolerant to high and low temperature, to water scarcity etc. Barley is "easy", wheat is "less easy", so the pre-historical men might have preferred barley to wheat. That, in turn, might have favoured the discovery of beer of course.

What you say about spirits being more transportable and less deperishable is true, but they were not known in pre-history and probably not even in early history (it is very likely the Ancient Romans did not know distillation). In fact, spirits were in certain moment of civilization a form of currency, they were a sort of currency in the Wild West. They contain value in small space, they maintain value with time (if we consider the interest rate equal to the angel's share), and they are not perishable. But that doesn't apply to beer.

I don't understand how can you think that it is not necessary for a currency to be easily transportable.
Maybe you mean what is transported is the "title" to it, and I agree, but then again we have a currency "backed" by beer and not beer as currency.

I wasn't there in pre-history (not in my present incarnation, at least) and so I cannot tell for sure, but I find that certain conclusions are way to simplistic. Pre-history it's all hypothesis and conjectures.

Regarding jealousy as property, I read every day in the news of people killing each other for jealousy, not for theft. It's much more deeply ingrained in human mind than anything cultural. It's deep belly IMHO.

I consider entirely possible that in certain communities the "alpha male" might have had the right over several women, but I don't consider this the normal "instinctive" behaviour of Homo sapiens, and certainly not the way the species behaved at large. Even in historical times we have had examples of cultural groups practising "polilove" but they were always a scant minority. I actually think that, in any case, property and accumulation are, also, instincts (which, in embryo, are present in squirrels, dogs etc. that is, accumulating for the hard days).

Again, the evolution from this society of "alpha males" to a society of "proprietary husbands" can have been caused by jealousy rather than the other way round. We find jealousy also in chimpanzees and probably in other primates.

[kiwi Bruce]

Prohibitionism only took place in mostly Protestant countries (USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Finland)

Where the hell did you get this crap!...
The 18th amendment was an amendment to the US constitution, in the U.S.of A. only... not Canada, Australia, UK or Finland. The Commonwealth Countries never had a problem with booze, which is why the main smuggling routes into the US were from the British Caribbean Islands and down from Canada. Don't go tarring us down-under or Mother England for that matter, with your "prohibition" brush. This is a lie...retract this right now or I'll go...

BS Button.jpg (20.83 KiB) Viewed 3091 times

I'm pushing this puppy!

[Birrofilo]

Prohibitionism only took place in mostly Protestant countries (USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Finland)

Where the hell did you get this crap!...
The 18th amendment was an amendment to the US constitution, in the U.S.of A. only... not Canada, Australia, UK or Finland. The Commonwealth Countries never had a problem with booze, which is why the main smuggling routes into the US were from the British Caribbean Islands and down from Canada. Don't go tarring us down-under or Mother England for that matter, with your "prohibition" brush. This is a lie...retract this right now or I'll go...

BS Button.jpg

I'm pushing this puppy!

Man, I don't tell you where you should put the button, you'll figure out yourselves.
Prohibitionism did not begin, nor end, with the 18th amendement of the US Constitution. It comes from very far.
You shouldn't talk about things you know nothing about.

If you want to educate yourself, read the book I mentioned in a previous post, which is rich of information about all the prohibitionists movements (and the laws) in the various parts of the world.

"Temperance leagues" sometimes succeded in their effort (in the US, parts of Canada, Finland) in part failed (in Sweden there was a referendum IIRC, in other scandinavian countries there were legislative proposals, etc.). But - you see - "temperance leagues" either did not exist or did not have any influence in Mexico, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Switzerland, Southern Germany and Austria. So there is some sort of correlation between religion (or religious mentality, in my opinion) and prohibistionist mentality (whether this found success in the form of laws or not).

You are not entitled to your own facts, you should know.

Drink: a cultural history of alcohol by Iain Gately will tell you the entire story

[kiwi Bruce]

Man, I don't tell you where you should put the button, you'll figure out yourselves.
In my still!...but it's plastic and we don't do that..
You are not entitled to your own facts, you should know.
Being an old ignorant SOB I'm always entitled to my own facts...and I invent new ones every day...feel free to push the BS button, it's very liberating...or you can stick in your still...but again it's plastic and we don't do that on HD
Drink: a cultural history of alcohol by Iain Gately will tell you the entire story

Too old to read books about not drinking...I like books on Booze and How to Make it

Tell you what...you pour a good two fingers full of your best spirit into a glass and I'll do the same on my end and on the count of three... we toast the end of all the sanctimonious, self-righteous booze haters...

1...2...3

[Birrofilo]

Man, I like brewing and spirits. And I like brewers and distillers! (and also wine makers, in truth, and cider makers, etc.).

The book is about how bad it is for humanity to think that alcohol is your enemy, while it's your friend! It's a nice reading.

I gladly raise my glass with you to the end of all kinds of prohition, including home-distilling!

[badflash]

Birrofilo, your cultural filter is showing.
Money is a new thing. Barter was how it was done for hundreds of thousands of years. You butcher my meat, I will build your hut. Dowries were in things like sheep and cattle, not coins. Cows and sheep can move, but that is hardly transportable. Real banking did not come into being until the Crusades. Few traveled very far, so it just wasn't needed.
There are lots of other cultures that observe other pairing relationships. In Tibet, the male children stay with the land. They are all married to the same women and none of them are sure who the father is. When the females get to marriageable age, they are sent away to a family that needs a wife. This prevents subdivision of scarce land. Polygamy is well known and works where the society permits it.

As to grain being a great food, I agree, but you miss the point. It is food. It is not mind altering. People don't change from something that works (hunting) to something that takes a lot of planning and coordination to work. Think about how things progress. Start with hunter-gathering. Why would they form a village that requires agriculture? They already have food, very exciting food. They only spend about an hour a day to get everything they need. Why trade that for back breaking work, day in and day out? Why cooperate with lots of people? Why invent writing and math to keep track of grain? Sorry, I won't do it for oatmeal.

Once you have built the village and agriculture and your population grows, and youinvent government to handle the chaos, you are trapped, and there is no going back. Tell me where I am wrong.

[kiwi Bruce]

I've heard the arguments about where civilization started...Egypt or Mesopotamia... six of one half a dozen of the other. One thing I do know, in Egypt there was no need for money or any other exchange medium. During the rule of Pharaoh Djoser, in about 2650 BC, when Imhotep was the Egyptian chancellor, there was a famine that lasted almost a decade. (there is a poem from a millennium later that goes " who is like Imhotep, the genius of Egypt" during the famine the people of Egypt "Sold" everything to Djoser and his successors in order to survive...their cattle, their land and homes, then themselves and their children :- FOREVER! The people owed their rulers for their lives and their livelihood, and they were never allowed to forget it. This is way the Pharaohs where loved and worshiped. If you were an Egyptian in the time of the Pharaohs you were expected to them a "Royal" fifth, of your livestock, your harvest and your time, only the Priesthood and their lands were exempt. Imhotep came up with the concept that a laborers active working life was 6000 days. (This became very important later on, one of the most important trading items was the talent, equal to a laborers active working life of 6000 days, it weighed 110 pounds of silver or 22 pounds of gold) But in Egypt if Pharaoh needed laborers to build a Temple or a pyramid, or soldiers for the nation defense, you owed him a fifth of your life, or about five years. He didn't pay you, he gave the laborers and troops a very generous quota of meat, fish, fowl, bread and beer. This simple system worked for millennia...the ancient Egyptians lives were bound to their Pharaoh, and his to them... and he gave them loads of beer!

[Birrofilo]

Birrofilo, your cultural filter is showing.
Money is a new thing. Barter was how it was done for hundreds of thousands of years. You butcher my meat, I will build your hut. Dowries were in things like sheep and cattle, not coins. Cows and sheep can move, but that is hardly transportable. Real banking did not come into being until the Crusades. Few traveled very far, so it just wasn't needed.
There are lots of other cultures that observe other pairing relationships. In Tibet, the male children stay with the land. They are all married to the same women and none of them are sure who the father is. When the females get to marriageable age, they are sent away to a family that needs a wife. This prevents subdivision of scarce land. Polygamy is well known and works where the society permits it.

As to grain being a great food, I agree, but you miss the point. It is food. It is not mind altering. People don't change from something that works (hunting) to something that takes a lot of planning and coordination to work. Think about how things progress. Start with hunter-gathering. Why would they form a village that requires agriculture? They already have food, very exciting food. They only spend about an hour a day to get everything they need. Why trade that for back breaking work, day in and day out? Why cooperate with lots of people? Why invent writing and math to keep track of grain? Sorry, I won't do it for oatmeal.

Once you have built the village and agriculture and your population grows, and youinvent government to handle the chaos, you are trapped, and there is no going back. Tell me where I am wrong.

There are several known cultures that practised some form or other of female sharing. I remember reading in the TCI guide Etiopia, 1938, that at a certain Ethiopian village there was this rule: a man and a woman would manifest their intention to marry. Then the woman would go in a hut outside of the village for one month, and any man in the village could go there and have sex with her. If, after the month, the woman still wonted to marry the fiancée, the marriage would happen. I don't think this was done to ensure a happy couple. I suppose the real benefit for that society was that at least every first born child could be anybody's, and this lowers the frictions in the village, because they are all potential relatives.
Where you are wrong is in not considering that those cultures are a scant minority. "Culture" is a potent influencer in human behaviour, and we can find cultures having totally different, opposing behaviours. But I think "nurture" is visible in the sheer average. The exceptional behaviour is the one Eskimo, the Tibetan, or that Ethiopian. That's not the normality of human behaviour, statistically. If most cultures are "jealous" is because there is the seed of jealousy in the human nature! "Culture" can repress that, or stress it.

For barter you can and must use anything. Barter requires the simultaneous satisfaction of a double need. I need some eggs, and I can offer milk, I have to find somebody having eggs who would accept some milk. So beer cannot be used in barter more than anything else, anything that can satisfy a need can be exchange in barter.

But barter is impractical, and since the dawn of civilazion (enormously before banking) humanity learnd to use a currency, things like rare shells. An object used as currency must certainly have certain requisite in order to work: it has to be scarce, small and light, non perishable, non falsifiable. Currency exist in humanity since much before writing.
Besides, a currency allows accumulation, beer cannot allow accumulation, also on personal level. Prehistoric "rich" had vast reserves of grains, not of beer (yeas, that was also found, large private quantities of cereals, thought to be private).

If you really think that the basic needs of men can be easily satisfied by wandering/collection, then why make agriculture at all? Beer is producible by hunters-gatherers, and is producible by shepherds. We have - as I mentioned - proof of beer making even before agriculture! Why should beer be a reason to become farmers more than anything else which is farmed? People can get stones without inventing agriculture.

Agriculture creates a huge raise in productivity, which makes possible to have soldiers, priests, smiths, walls, food reserves. The advantages of agriculture are immense if compared to gathering. Beer is, in this context, utterly insignificant, as nice as it can be. Food and safety come before fun. It's as if the posterity will theoretize that Internet was invented to share porn images. We certainly share them but it's not its main purpose. The main purpose is obviously making a better whisky

[badflash]

Barter does not require immediate satisfaction, only a way to keep track. I barter hay for pork and grain for pork, work for eggs. It just requires mutual trust. In ancient societies, before agriculture, it was more communist and was run like a family.

There was no accumulation. There was no perceived need for it. With few people, life was easy and everything was plentiful. Yes, a hunter-gatherer could brew beer, but only once a year. Who would be willing to live with that situation? Without agriculture, it would take forever to gather enough wild grain for beer, which requires a lot more grain than bread. In order to have beer when they wanted it, they had to grow it. There is no evidence that anything was grown before grain. The evidence for beer production predates bread by over 2000 years. Please explain that.

Agriculture creates the death spiral that created society. Of course once you have society, you can force people to work all the time and support all the things that societies bring. It is a trap, and once created, there is no way out. That is how all evolution works. It doesn't need to be efficient, it just needs to be able to survive better than the competition. Compare settlers in the USA to the Native Americans. You can't claim the Europeans were culturally superior, only that they could use force to overwhelm them.

[Birrofilo]

Barter does not require immediate satisfaction, only a way to keep track. I barter hay for pork and grain for pork, work for eggs. It just requires mutual trust. In ancient societies, before agriculture, it was more communist and was run like a family.

There was no accumulation. There was no perceived need for it. With few people, life was easy and everything was plentiful. Yes, a hunter-gatherer could brew beer, but only once a year. Who would be willing to live with that situation? Without agriculture, it would take forever to gather enough wild grain for beer, which requires a lot more grain than bread. In order to have beer when they wanted it, they had to grow it. There is no evidence that anything was grown before grain. The evidence for beer production predates bread by over 2000 years. Please explain that.

Agriculture creates the death spiral that created society. Of course once you have society, you can force people to work all the time and support all the things that societies bring. It is a trap, and once created, there is no way out. That is how all evolution works. It doesn't need to be efficient, it just needs to be able to survive better than the competition. Compare settlers in the USA to the Native Americans. You can't claim the Europeans were culturally superior, only that they could use force to overwhelm them.

Regarding barter, even if you keep track, you still need to have some double need. Sooner or later the goods must be exchanged. Currency (also in forms of shells) takes away double needs and the need for trust.
You seem to believe in pre-history as a form of ideal society, where there is no accumulation, there is mutual trust, there is mutual exchange of woman, no property, and a lot of peace.

It is much more likely that there is, instead, a lot of oppression and tyranny of the strong toward the weak (or: the strong group toward the weak group).

Regarding beer predating agriculture, as I already mentioned, some American pre-agricoltural population is know to have walked distances to go to grain fields to brew for periods, and then go back to their base. It's in the quoted book, if you are interested I will go and quote the specific part. You don't need agriculture to brew beer (or to produce alcohol, with fruit, cane etc.).

You see "society" as created by a "death spiral" caused by agriculture. Why this pessimistic vision? People go toward progress. Humanity exchanges the worse for the better. If hunting-gathering had made people happier than agriculture, mankind would have never chosen agriculture. Prehistoric doesn't mean pre-rational.

I see all interconnected phenomena: agricolture allows a steady flow of accumulable food in excess of basic survival needs. This in turn allows to spend resources into defence, praying (extremely important for people at the total mercy of elements, illnesses) and allows stable defensible lodgings near water springs. That is a great great improvements in defeating hunger, thirst, cold and enemies.

A hunter-gatherer would sleep in caverns when he finds them, but will have to change place when the place becomes exhausted or unsafe. Water can be very far from caverns, and also grain fields can be far from caverns. When you begin a hunting expedition you don't know what you catch, you don't know if you catch at all. You can eat what you find, and that can be poisonous or indigestible or stinking. Sleeping under a roof knowing that your crop is growing just outside the town walls is a huge improvement compared to sleeping under the stars and the rain during a hunt expedition or an exploration for food. I woudn't call this a "death spiral".

Accumulation is the very first condition of security. You don't want to die of hunger just because you had a bad crop. Having three-year reserves helps you to sleep much better, under your roof.
Accumulation is also the condition for a statal organization (even if at city level): that brings order and personal safety.