
“Alcohol and caffeine created civilization” - rmason
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/02/28/alcohol-caffeine-coffee-evolution-humans-column/98210372/
======
beloch
There's nothing new about the "beer theory of civilization", although this
article doesn't really explain it very well.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of it is that it explains how we
domesticated crops in the first place. Consider the wild antecedent of
maize(corn): teosinte. It's basically grass. It's "cobs", if they can truly
even be called that, are _tiny_. You simply couldn't settle down and try to
grow this stuff and be able to actually feed yourself. The yield of edible
material is just too tiny. You'd spend more calories growing the stuff than
you'd get back out of it. It took thousands of years of selective breeding to
yield a crop that would make agriculture viable, so how the hell did we do
that when there were no farmers?

Beer.

While it's not practical to settle in one spot and try to grow teosinte for
food, it is possible to gather up enough wild teosinte to make a small amount
of chicha (a fermented drink similar to beer). Tedious and painful, but
possible. Hunter-gatherers who developed a taste for chicha likely learned
they could save time by saving some of the seeds they gathered and scattering
them in areas where they'd grow well. Return to the same spot in a year and
the next batch of chicha will be easier to make! Selective breeding was a next
step.

The important notion here is that, because they were making chicha, these
hunter-gatherers had motivation to save themselves time and effort without
actually having to rely on a crop that was not able to feed them enough
calories to pay back the effort expended on it. Thus, humans didn't have to
magically peer thousands of years into the future and start domesticating
crops so that agriculture would one day become possible. They just had to like
beer and be lazy.

~~~
zeveb
> They just had to like beer and be lazy.

Fortunately, this is something that ancient & modern men alike excel at!

It is kinda funny to think that a prime reason for us developing advanced
societies, civilisation & technology is also a prime factor in damage to
society, uncivilised behaviour & destruction.

~~~
gdubs
Or as Homer Simpson said, "Alcohol, the cause and solution to all of life's
problems!"

------
sn41
This seems an inane and oversimplified view. Sure, coffee would have helped.
But ignoring colonization, and its huge positive impact on Western Europe and
negative impact elsewhere, and concluding that industrialization is a
corollary of a stimulant is strange.

I think these kind of "historians" rarely bother to place themselves in
historical context. This article seems right in the much derided class of
insight porn articles. I believe history is not the result of "one minor
cause" \- you could write articles equally myopic that the Chinese invention
of sailing against the wind created civilization, gunpowder created
civilization, double-entry bookkeeping created civilization, steam power
created civilization, better glasswork and telescopes created civilization,
etc. It was not one thing by itself, but probably everything together.

~~~
jfoutz
The only argument i ever really bought was the origin of agriculture. and even
that is pretty suspect, but i still think it's a decent argument.

10,000 years ago, pretty much everyone was a hunter gatherer. Humans can
survive on pretty much anything from seeds to whales. There's not really much
need to control the environment to maintain a food source in that context.
Yes, there will be lean years, yes there are other populations you're in
competition with (but they could also be food...)

In any case, the argument goes, somebody stumbled on fermentation. The desire
for regular access to whatever plant got you drunk might actually be enough to
become a farmer. It's tough to say. I think it's plausible, and probably part
of the whole story.

Hunter gatherers were healthier and longer lived than their farming
counterparts. I think that's still true of the few hunter gatherer cultures
that remain. Food security is a good reason, but for a human, especially a
hunter gatherer, everything is food. Alcohol security though, that's a pretty
compelling argument. Perhaps not for you personally, but i'm sure you've met
people that would agree. Addiction is powerful.

~~~
LoSboccacc
Also domestication could have had a part, once you have a herd nomadic life is
much harder and you need to tend to pastures.

~~~
allendoerfer
Domestication also explains, why development has been slower in Africa. They
had nothing to domesticate.

~~~
XaspR8d
Is this a testable claim? Were, say, sheep progenitors easier to domesticate
than ibexes or antelope or okapi?

~~~
ecdavis
It's a claim made by Jared Diamond in _Guns, Germs, and Steel_. Wikipedia has
a pretty well cited section on "Behavioural preadaptation"[0] however I can't
speak to its accuracy as I haven't read any of the literature.

I'd be pretty interested in seeing a domesticatability comparison of the
guanaco (wild predecessor of the domesticated llama still in existence today)
vs. the zebra.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_animals#Behav...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_animals#Behavioral_preadaption)

------
charlesism

        > No two drugs have defined human civilization the 
        > way alcohol and caffeine have.
    

Tobacco?

As much as one can quantify it, I'd argue it played as large a role as coffee
up until a few decades ago. Possibly larger.

Not that I'm planning on starting :)

~~~
rangibaby
Not a drug, but wars have been fought over spice (in real life).

~~~
lostlogin
But don't be forgetting Dune or Dune II. It was so fantastic.

~~~
rangibaby
in real life, too ;-)

------
peterwwillis
Caffeine (and other stimulants) have been traded by many civilizations over
many millennia in different areas of the world, and have not always given rise
to technological progress. In addition, progress in the methods of creating
alcohol have often been a side-effect of growing civilizations, not a cause
for them.

The article makes an argument that here we humans were, dumb and boring, and
suddenly we decided to create a means to produce certain products, and then we
created trade routes for these products, and then suddenly this caused
civilization to flourish, as if the presence of civilization was not necessary
for these things to happen to begin with. It's like saying "the horseless
carriage developed America", as if America didn't exist before it was created,
to say nothing of paved roads.

Clickbaity clickbait.

------
bigbugbag
This article title is quite the outrageous claim akin to clickbait, claim
that's not substantiated in the article content.

Actually the content says: "research suggests that alcohol may have helped
create civilization itself" which is far from what the titles claims but fails
to provide source about this supposed research.

Reading this felt like a piece of entertainment based on opinion, much
confusion and stuff that does not make much sense: in times before humans
could purify water and prepare food but they somehow where able to brew beer,
correlation of events made into causal link and so on.

How does this kind of crap gets to HN front page ?

------
jnordwick
"The History of the World in Six Glasses" by Tom Standage lays out a similar
time line. He breaks the world into two sections - alcohol and caffeine - and
each of those into three periods: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and soda.

Each period be described how the drink became so important. It's a very
interesting and quick read.

[https://books.google.com/books/about/A_History_of_the_World_...](https://books.google.com/books/about/A_History_of_the_World_in_Six_Glasses.html?id=P-_3AgAACAAJ&hl=en)

------
mirimir
> "... Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and
> stimulated, rather than relaxed and mildly inebriated, and the quality and
> quantity of their work improved … Western Europe began to emerge from an
> alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries.”

That's quite a claim. So did prior high-tech civilizations have equivalents?
Tea in China, of course. But others?

~~~
srcreigh
For what it's worth, as recently as early 17th century England did not have
coffee. If you grant that the difference in caffeine between coffee and tea is
significant, then we can conclude that Western Europe must have received those
benefits only by the 1650's - 1700's.

Source:

    
    
        25. The Turks use likewise a kind of herb, called " coffee,"
        which they dry, grind to powder, and drink in warm water. They affirm
        that it gives no small vigour both to their courage and their wit.
        Yet this taken in large quantities will excite and disturb the mind;
        which shows it to be of a similar nature to opiates.
    

from Francis Bacon in _The History of Life and Death_ , published in 1638
posthumously. You can read the full work here:
[http://www.sirbacon.org/historylifedeath.htm](http://www.sirbacon.org/historylifedeath.htm)

~~~
lostlogin
I'm no authority but I wonder if he is misunderstanding Turkish coffee
(especially as they left sacks of beans behind at Vienna not too much later).
Turkish coffee sometimes has ground up herbs added to it, which could cause
confusion to the observer? There is a pretty well documented use of coffee
beans in Turkish coffee earlier than the date you cite, so I wonder what is
going on?

Everyone favourite source:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_coffee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_coffee)

~~~
jessaustin
Bacon used here a more expansive definition of "herb": "a plant derivative
that has flavor" rather than "something you'll find in your spice rack". The
fact that coffee comes from beans wasn't relevant to his argument.

~~~
lostlogin
Thanks, I miss read that as calling something else coffee.

------
keithwhor
Interesting. My first thought was, "well, they've certainly helped create
hundreds if not thousands of startups."

~~~
astrodust
It certainly created the very first start-up: The idea of growing crops. To a
hunter-gatherer the very idea seemed stupid, so much time spent planting and
tilling when you could go out and beat something with a club and have dinner
in minutes.

You can't really forage for alcohol. You have to farm it.

Then the hunter-gatherers were probably interested in trading for alcohol and
the economy was born.

~~~
andrepd
Those are some really wild unsubstantiated guesses :^)

~~~
RangerScience
Sounds like a good start to a [http://bahfest.com/](http://bahfest.com/)
submission!

------
kozak
What concentration of alcohol has to be in water to make it resistant to
getting stale? E.g. if I have ethanol and drinkable water, how much should I
add to get the water protected from the bacteria without turning it into a
serious alcoholic drink?

~~~
mrob
There's no fixed threshold. It depends on the alcohol tolerance of the
microbes that happen to be present. 2% ABV might make a noticeable difference.
20% ABV will probably last forever.

However, it's not just the alcohol acting as a preservative, it's also the
yeast using up other things microbes need, such as nitrogen sources (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeast_assimilable_nitrogen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeast_assimilable_nitrogen)
). 100% malt beer wort usually contains more than the yeast needs, but fruit
juice, honey, and adjunct-heavy beer wort can have lower levels, and even in
the 100% malt case the yeast might be able to use all of it. The yeast will
use up vitamins and minerals too. It can be a problem if it means the yeast
stops working before all the sugar is fermented ("stuck fermentation"), but
adding excessive nutrients is also bad, because they'll make the final product
more hospitable to other microbes.

------
11thEarlOfMar
> "and the quality and quantity of their work improved"

I've always said that I owe my career, what there is of it, to caffeine. I
guess I wasn't kidding.

~~~
Rainymood
>I've always said that I owe my career, what there is of it, to #DRUGOFCHOICE.
I guess I wasn't kidding.

Kinda weird how caffeine, still technically a drug like speed/ritalin/adderal
etc, is so accepted in today's society. Sorry if I'm mixing up drugs with
active ingredients I know very little about drugs.

~~~
exprA
You'd think you should be more confused about how alcohol is as accepted as it
is.

I feel more pity for the way people still want to impose control over other
folks life – and quietly dream of the day more people accepted that substance
abuse is the problem, not the substances themselves (and gave more room for
personal responsibility and different choices in life). I personally don't see
a fundamental difference in people turning away from society for e.g.
spiritual reasons, or because they want to get high, but think they should
only do so if they can afford it wholly by themselves. (I do accept if
assistance – financial, etc.. - comes with obligations.)

------
andrepd
The "beer as a safe alternative to water" is likely a myth. See
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yts0v/comme...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yts0v/comment/cfnrg32)

~~~
mulmen
Can we please have a higher standard of truth than a Reddit comment,
especially one that doesn't cite any sources? I am not saying the linked
comment is wrong but why should I believe it over anything else?

~~~
BigJono
A comment by a flaired user in /r/AskHistorians is a very different thing to a
"Reddit comment".

~~~
fsloth
Yes, but it's just a reddit comment none the less with no way to backtrack to
peer reviewed work.

~~~
jetru
We've all learnt that "peer reviewed work" is code for "accept other peoples
papers so they will accept ours" and has nothing to do with confirming the
finding.

~~~
mulmen
Are you implying that we should just accept peer reviewed work and Reddit
comments as equally valid? I don't disagree with you, peer-review is no
guarantee of proof but I assign more weight to it than an upvote. Especially
if I can read the work myself and investigate further sources.

------
thadk
This chapter of Calestous Juma's new book on pushbacks around innovations has
a fascinating chapter about how coffee and coffeehouses were like a kind of
social media product that got banned and unbanned from its introduction in the
1500s Middle East to Europe and USA:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=i5dHDAAAQBAJ&q=Coffee#v=sn...](https://books.google.com/books?id=i5dHDAAAQBAJ&q=Coffee#v=snippet&q=Coffee&f=false)

------
Jach
As Yang Wenli says... "Alcohol is humanity's friend. Can I abandon a friend?
Humans were drinking alcohol five thousand years ago. And they're still
drinking it now. And five thousand years from now, they'll be drinking
alcohol. Although it's unlikely there will be a human race in five thousand
years."
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_YxauHnpyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_YxauHnpyg))

I don't partake, and think if any drug ought to be illegal it should be
alcohol for the damage it has caused, but then I wonder what humanity would
look like if our brains didn't respond to it any more than water.

------
arxpoetica
The article briefly mentions a new study done on mice that can "affect the
mind as adversely as cocaine." But nowhere (that I can find) is the study
cited. Can anyone find the study or does anyone know what study is being
cited?

------
trhway
10M years ago a primate developed ability to efficiently metabolize alcohol
and that primate became common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas.
So, yes, alcohol was key ingredient that led to creation of our civilization.

------
blakesterz
Gastropod has a really neat episode where they talk the history of coffee and
caffeine and how it came to (and changed) Europe.

[https://gastropod.com/caffeine/](https://gastropod.com/caffeine/)

------
zeteo
Or rather "alcohol bad, caffeine good". The author is from Cato Institute -
are they planning to bring Prohibition back now? Anyway here are a few major
holes in the story.

\- "People drank alcohol because it was safer than water". If you want safe
water, all you have to do is boil it. A lot simpler than beer brewing.

\- "People became smarter after the Englightenment and started drinking coffee
instead of alcohol". How about drinking coffee in addition to alcohol? The
coffee houses developed in parallel with the beer houses, not instead of them.
We recently had an article on HN that made the point that alcohol consumption
actually increased in the 19th century.

\- "Adam Smith was so smart because he drank coffee". He also drank lots of
wine - preferably Bordeaux (or claret, as they called it in Scotland). Some of
the most bitter passages in Wealth of Nations are directed against the British
government using taxation to promote port wine (Portugal was a British ally)
over claret (France was usually an enemy).

~~~
jfoutz
> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it.

All we have to do is boil it, because we have a germ theory. If i'd been
drinking from the same well for 30 years, I don't think I'd make the
connection that the water was somehow _bad_ unless it tasted funny or was
cloudy.

However, if i acquire a taste for tea, a good fraction of my water is
automatically purified.

Alcohol, of course, is a nice way to store those hard grown calories. Grapes
don't last long, wheat gets infested with bugs and rats. Beer and wine keep
for a while. And of course, also purified.

Archaic doesn't mean stupid. We are all lucky John Snow was so diligent. That
was a tough connection to make. And of course, once it was discovered, people
regularly boil water when there are issues with the local water supply.

We got kind of lucky by getting addicted to things that inadvertently had
unknown positive effects. Which, in my humble, non immunologist or doctor kind
of way, probably outweighed the really terrible negative effects of long term
massive alcohol consumption.

~~~
Waterluvian
Did anyone live long enough to die of long term massive alcohol consumption?

~~~
jfoutz
i think average lifespan was historically low because of infant mortality, and
childhood deaths. If you made it to 20, you had good odds of making it to 60.
Socrates was like 70. In order to die of something like that, you'd have to be
pretty darn wealthy, i'd think. First, rich enough to survive childhood, and
then rich enough to drink a lot.

------
dieg0
tea is awesome. In the US peeps don't drink it because there isn't any good
ones available... this is crazy, not even trader joe's or new seasons carry
good ones. I drink herbal teas every day, and during my time in the US it's
one of the things I missed the most. Also, maybe this is only me, but coffee
gives me diarrhea.. lol

~~~
michael_h
"In the US peeps don't drink it because there isn't any good ones available"

The internet has taken care of that. Also, the Canadians have been supplying
us with Red Rose for more than a century, which, while not top of the line, is
a highly acceptable everyday bag tea.

Also, you can get PG Tips pretty much everywhere.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not holding up RedRose and PG as the pinnacle of teadom
- they're just very acceptable and available widely.

------
Nano2rad
Alcohol consumers and old people tell the truth. Youth are not able to
decipher the truth, even if they do they cannot tell.

------
dnprock
Not true. No alcohol in Islamic sphere. No caffeine in East Asia. You still
got civilizations developed.

~~~
rev_null
I'm pretty sure Islam came about after civilization had been established.

------
sametmax
People drink alcohol because it's a social lubricant. Mostly to ease
acceptance or improve the chance of sex.

And coffee because of fatigue.

It's not rocket science. It has not "created civilization", merely compensated
civilization flaws.

------
thunder-ltu
I say, people created civilization, take That. Logic.

------
noosphere2017
But "cannabis and psilocybin created religion"

[http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/BOT135/Lect20b.htm](http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/BOT135/Lect20b.htm)

------
EugeneOZ
If Homo sapiens survived because of alcohol and coffee, monkey survived
because of skills, then who is smarter? Not author of this article.

