Broadly speaking, it’s thought that intensified agriculture developed out of broad-spectrum domestication as a coping mechanism for the worldwide cooling and drying of the Younger Dryas event around 11.5Ka (Anderson et al. 2007, Weninger et al. 2006). It’s thought that the very first forms of alcohol consumed would have been from rotting fruit by hunter-gatherers well before the shift to agriculture. While intoxicating, this could very easily go wrong depending on the microbial populations present in that fermented fruit. But the earliest archaeological evidence of alcohol brewing and consumption is in Iran with wine (Cordain et al. 2005: 344), while beer shows up in the archaeological record a few millenia later (ibid:344). Granted, beer could have been around much earlier, it’s just not archaeologically visible. But here is a key point: Both wine and beer provided a safe source of water, and in these more arid environments, this would have been a big-time advantage. This is especially the case given that early agriculturalists also had livestock, which likely would have contaminated local water supplies with their feces. In fact, there appears to be convergent evolution of lactase enzyme persistence in early agro-pastoralist populations (Itan et al. 2010), not necessarily because livestock milk was needed for calories, but because it was a safe source of water. So within this framework, beer, wine and milk would have been equally matched in their significance as safe water sources. BUT beer has multiple advantages over wine and milk. First, you cannot metabolize milk sugars without lactase persistence into adulthood, whereas all human populations can metabolize grain alcohols to a certain extent. Second, early beer likely resembled a porridge rather than what we recognize today as beer, and so it was not only safe source of water, but a calorie-laden and easily digested food source. Third, the alcohol present in beer provided a key opportunity for safely storing grains in the absence of sanitation and refrigeration, keeping grain stores from spoiling. Fourth, even if the grain did start to spoil before it was brewed into beer, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Basset et al. (1981) found skeletal evidence that ancient Nubians were unknowingly medicating themselves with a broad spectrum antibiotic (tetracycline) in their beer, secreted by Streptomycetes bacteria in the stored grains for brewing; if they’d baked the grain into bread, the tetracycline would have likely denatured, so beer is a likely candidate for antibiotic delivery. This helped spare them from a lot of zoonotic pathogens transmitted by their livestock, which could be serious and cause quite a bit of morbidity and mortality. SO. Beer might not have been the reason why agriculture originated, but it certainly was a major reason for its success.

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Basset et al. (1980) Tetracycline-Labeled Human Bone from Sudanese Nubia. Science 209 (4464): 1532-1534.

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