The origins of alcoholic beverages

7. March 2024 at 14:30
Institute of Archaeology of the CAS, Prague
Letenská 4, 118 00 Prague

The lecture "The origins of alcoholic beveragesnotions and their role in the emergence of complex societies" will be presented by Václav Hrnčíř in the ARÚ library and online via Zoom https://cesnet.

The earliest evidence of alcoholic beverages comes from China in the 7th millennium BC. However, it is very likely that humans produced alcohol much earlier, as hunter-gatherers in the Pleistocene period. This is difficult to prove, however, because the presumed production and consumption took place in an organicvessels, which, unlike later pottery, have not survived. One way to shed light on this issue is to look at the distribution of alcohol among ethnographically documented hunter-gatherer societies. How many of them produced alcohol in the pre-colonial period and from what raw materials? This is what I will try to answer in the first part of the lecture. In the second, I will then present the results of a study that used a global sample of 186 societies to investigate whether alcohol consumption facilitated the emergence of complex societies. Could alcohol really have led to the development of civilisations through improving human creativity, enhancing mutual trust and cooperation, as the proponents of the 'drunken theory' claim, or is this nonsense? Find out in this lecture.