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| ISBN-13: | 9781782626251 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Royal Society of Chemistry |
| Publication date: | 01/13/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 665 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Alcohol and its Role in the Evolution of Human Society
By Ian S. Hornsey
The Royal Society of Chemistry
Copyright © 2012 Ian S. HornseyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84973-161-4
CHAPTER 1
Introductory Matter
THERE IS ONLY ONE HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH
Steven A. Benner
There is, and always has been, a never-ending struggle between man and micro-organisms for the opportunity to consume food supplies. These food supplies are ultimately the legacy of the photosynthetic activity of plants. The study of the history of alcoholic fermentation is necessarily multi-faceted, involving basic biological science, the life and culture of ancient peoples, the study of races and their customs and the interactions of plants and humans. Understanding the process of plant domestication is fundamental to our comprehension of the rise of agriculture, and knowledge of the latter is a prerequisite for understanding the importance of alcoholic beverages in the development of mankind.
Before the modern era, only the Eskimos, the peoples of Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America and the Australian aborigines apparently lived out their lives without the medical benefits and mind-altering effects of alcohol. While polar regions generally lacked resources for fermentable monosaccharides, honey and sugar-rich fruits and other plants are plentiful in temperate parts of the globe and the tropics. In the New World, most of North America was devoid of indigenous alcoholic beverages prior to Columbus, while, further south, maize, the juice of the century plant and the saguaro cactus were sweet enough to ferment directly into chicha, pulque and cactus wine, respectively. As a rule of thumb, the plant species-rich areas of the globe, such as the tropics were/are home to the greatest variety of alcoholic drinks. In Europe, ancient northern peoples were somewhat starved of "available sugar" sources and relied on grains to make their alcoholic drink (beer), while those in southern Europe had recourse to berries (for wine), which would yield fermentable material with far less persuasion.
The major raw materials (fermentable sugars) available to prehistoric man for fermentation purposes would have been the monosaccharides glucose and fructose and the disaccharides sucrose, lactose and maltose. The latter could be obtained from sprouting grain, and lactose is present in milk. The two monosaccharides, and their dimer, sucrose, are invariable components of fruits and honey. It is likely that, where they grew, juice from the fruits of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) and the fig (Ficus carica L.) would have been important sources of fermentable sugar.
The date palm was one of the first trees to be taken into cultivation in the Old World. Fossil evidence suggests that fermentable fruits became prominent around 80 million years ago (Mya), in the Cretaceous, during the age of the dinosaurs. The end of the Cretaceous saw, in addition to the emergence of fruits, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the emergence of mammals and fruit flies. Provided that the relevant microbes were available, these sugar-containing fruits could have undergone spontaneous fermentation and thus, in essence, become the "first alcoholic drinks". According to Dilcher, the strongest selection pressure in the angiosperms was directed toward the flower, fruits and seeds.
It is a long-held, almost universal, human belief (albeit in various forms) that alcoholic drinks, particularly wine and beer, were bestowed upon mankind by a deity that took pity on his plight. In many ancient cultures beer was a gift to women from a female deity, and brewing was for centuries intimately connected with the fairer sex (Figure 1.1). Certainly, the promotion of amylolysis in grain by chewing seems to have been (and still is) largely a female occupation (Figure 1.2). There seems to have been scant regard for gender equality in ancient times, for beverage consumption was largely the preserve of males (Figure 1.3)!
Increasing amounts of archaeological, ethnographic and evidence from around the world suggest that alcoholic beverages have been integral to the social, economic, religious and political aspects of many cultures. Feasting activities were especially important, and often marked critical events in the lives of individuals and communities, and frequently involved public rituals.
1.1 CROP DOMESTICATION
As for the study of the history of alcoholic beverages per se, "it was Robert Braidwood who started it all!" The University of Chicago anthropologist, who died in 2003 aged 95, was a leading light in the field of Near Eastern prehistory, and a pioneer in the study of crop domestication. Among other projects, Braidwood (and his wife, Linda) worked on the important southern Turkish mound site at Cayonu (literally, "beside the stream"), and obtained extensive evidence for the notion that there was a shift from hunter-gathering to agriculturalism in that area between 8000 and 12,000 years ago. The Braidwoods had previously been working at Jarmo, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in northern Iraq, the earliest Neolithic farming village in western Asia, or, in Braidwood's words "the world's oldest food producing community". The work at Jarmo tested Braidwood's "Hilly Flanks" hypothesis and, a little later, he proposed that there was a direct relationship between humans adopting a sedentary lifestyle and the domestication of wild barley. In his opinion, barley bread was the driving force for the "Neolithic Revolution", and this stimulated other workers to enter the field. One of Braidwood's major achievements was to assemble a group of scientists to identify and interpret archaeologically retrieved floral and faunal remains, thus giving birth to archaeological studies of agricultural origins.
Braidwood's articles "From cave to village" in the October 1952 Scientific American and his use of the new "symposium-by-mail" section in the American Anthropologist in 1953, which fostered "Did man once live by beer alone?" were responsible for preparing the ground for all subsequent work relating to man and alcohol. It is testimony to his scholarship that, 60 years on, his work is still held in high regard, and the "archaeology of alcohol" is now seen as a credible area of study (see Dietler's excellent review).
In my opinion, in order to exhaustively investigate the evolution of alcoholic beverages, and to appreciate their significance in the development of Homo sapiens, it is necessary to have much more than a passing acquaintance with the plants that provide fermentable material. Familiarity with the domestication profiles of these plants will also help us to integrate man and his most widely used intoxicant.
Archaeologists, anthropologists and others generally agree that the emergence of agriculture, together with the domestication of animals for food and labour, has brought about the most important transformation in man's culture since the last Ice Age. Despite the fundamental role of plant domestication in human history and the seminal nature of relatively few crop plants to modern man, we still have a paucity of information on how plants adapt under the influence of domestication.
In his 1859 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin devoted his first chapter to "Variation under Domestication", and he expanded on this theme nine years later in Variation in Animals and Plants under Domestication. The fact that one of the founders of evolutionary theory paid such attention to domestication, and the selection processes associated with it, is testimony to the value of crops (and animal breeds) in the study of natural selection. One of the major observations made by Darwin was that the morphological modifications selected during domestication have been of such magnitudes that most crop plants cannot survive in the wild any more without human assistance.
In addition, he pointed out that selection by breeders could lead to a wide array of variation in domesticated plants and animals when compared with their wild progenitors. He also suggested that selection under human cultivation happened unconsciously or inadvertently (i.e. without deliberate human action). He argued that crops are so different morphologically from their wild progenitors that humans could not have possibly identified target traits so different from those existing in the wild progenitor.
For Darwin, one of the benefits of considering selection under domestication was that he was able to demonstrate that selection had heritable effects, and, remember, this in the absence of any information about the histological, biochemical or genetic foundations of heredity. Darwin's elucidation of natural selection was one of the most monumental intellectual achievements in the history of science. No longer was it permissible to explain the innumerable adaptations of living organisms as being the result of the supernatural.
As Avise and Ayala have said: "Natural selection is an inevitable process of nature whenever organisms show heritable variation in their capacity to survive and reproduce in particular environments, but the operation has no more consciousness or intelligence than do natural physical forces such as gravity or the weather." Darwin's legacy, therefore, was not that evolution occurs, but rather that it results from a natural event rather than a supernatural one. The adaptation of plants to cultivation was vital to man's change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, and ultimately spawned the rise of civilization. Paul Gepts makes an eloquent case for regarding crop domestication as being a long-term selection experiment, and for an explanation of "plant domestication", I can do no better than to quote Barbara Pickersgill:
"Domestication is generally considered to be the end point of a continuum that starts with exploitation of wild plants, continues through cultivation of plants selected from the wild but not yet genetically different from wild plants, and terminates in fixation, through human selection, of morphological and hence genetic differences distinguishing a domesticate from its wild progenitor. These differences constitute the domestication syndrome and generally render the domesticate less capable of survival in the wild, thus dependent on man for its growth and reproduction. Features of the domestication syndrome include loss of dispersal, increase in size (especially of the harvested part of the plant), loss of seed dormancy and loss of chemical or mechanical protection against herbivores."
Until fairly recently, domestication had been interpreted as a rapid process with scant pre-domestication cultivation and a fairly rapid rise of domesticationcharacteristics (the "rapid-transition" model), and this has been central to the way in which biologists have organized their research into the origins of our crops. To substantiate this widely held premise, it has been assumed that artificial selection pressures were much stronger than natural selection pressures, resulting in genetic patterns of diversity that reflect genetic independence of geographic localities (such as the Near East). The rapid-transition model supported the concept of the "Neolithic Package", which implies that different crops were brought into domestication by the same group of early farmers. Zohary, in a paper discussing the monophyletic/polyphyletic origin of the ancient Near Eastern crops, argued that, if the Neolithic Package is an actuality then domesticated crops should be monophyletic, since there would have been little need for the same group of farmers to domesticate crops.
As Bruce Smith pointed out, it was between 5000 and 10,000 years ago, that humans domesticated virtually all major crop species used by modern agricultural societies. This feat was accomplished through artificial selection for traits that improved agronomic qualities. As a result of this process, favourable alleles at loci controlling agronomic traits were brought to fixation in the population during the domestication period. After the initial domestication, the continued practice of selective breeding allowed additional favourable alleles to sweep through the crop species, while diversifying selection in response to the different environments encountered during the expansion of the crop caused regional fixation of distinct favourable alleles. As a consequence of this complex history of selection, only a limited portion of the population contributed to each subsequent generation. Some anticipated consequences are a genome-wide loss of diversity at unselected genes because of the genetic bottleneck effect, a severe reduction in diversity at genes under directional selection during domestication and artificially high diversity at genes under diversifying selection.
These two processes – selection targeted on agronomic genes and drift due to the domestication bottleneck affecting the entire genome – are the principal factors that influence the amount and distribution of genetic variation in crop genomes as compared to their wild progenitors.
Jared Diamond is in no doubt about the relevance of plant and animal domestication; he calls it "the most important development in the past 13,000 years of human history ... it was prerequisite to the rise of civilization, and it transformed global demography". As Diamond says, food production could not possibly have arisen through a conscious decision, because the world's first farmers had no model of farming around them to observe, hence they could not have known that there was a goal of domestication to strive for, and could not have guessed the consequences that domestication would bring for them. He argues that if they had actually foreseen the consequences, they would surely have outlawed the first steps towards domestication, because the archaeological and ethnographic record throughout the world shows that the transition from hunting and gathering to farming eventually resulted in more work, lower adult stature, worse nutritional condition and heavier disease burdens. The only peoples who could make a conscious choice about becoming farmers were hunter-gatherers living adjacent to the first farming communities, and they generally disliked what they saw and rejected farming, for the good reasons just mentioned and others.
If plant and animal domestication was such a boon for mankind, why did it only arise in a few areas on the planet, and why did it occur earlier in some areas than others? Diamond reckons that the wild animal species that most plausibly could have yielded useful domesticates, all those years ago, were large terrestrial mammalian herbivores and omnivores, of which the planet holds 148 species weighing 45 kg or more. Only 14 of these were actually domesticated, which prompts us to ask what prevented the domestication of the other 134? Similarly, of the 200,000-odd wild species of higher plants worldwide, why did only around 100 give us valuable domesticates? Food for thought, indeed!
Diamond argues that those peoples who through "biogeographic serendipity" first produced domesticates acquired "enormous advantages over other peoples and expanded". According to Diamond, domestication ultimately yielded agents of conquest; his "guns, germs, and steel". It is evident that the ability to produce one's own food conferred huge demographic, technological, political and military advantages over neighbouring hunter-gatherers. As Diamond put it, "the history of the past 13,000 years consists of tales of hunter-gatherer societies becoming driven out, infected, conquered or exterminated by farming societies in every area of the world suitable for farming. One might, therefore, have anticipated that, in any part of the world, one or more of the local hunter-gatherer societies would have stumbled upon domestication, become farmers, and thereby out-competed the other local hunter-gatherer societies". The reality is that food production arose independently in, at most, nine areas of the world: the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, Andes/Amazonia, eastern United States, Sahel, tropical West Africa, Ethiopia and New Guinea. From archaeological evidence, the areas of the world where agriculture originated are shown in Figure 1.4.
1.2 PLANT ADDITIVES
As a species, Homo sapiens seems to have an innate desire to alter its state of consciousness and, to this end, narcotics, hallucinogens and other mind-altering compounds have been ingested in the form of vegetable matter, as have mild stimulants such as tea and coffee. I recommend Richard Rudgley's book as an introduction to intoxicants in society. The use of psychoactive plants goes back to prehistoric times and, therefore, there has been a long association between alcoholic beverages and plants with preservative, medicinal, psychtropic and flavouring properties. Some plants, and we may use the hop (Humulus lupulus L.) as an example, possess more than one of the above attributes – in this case having flavouring, preservative and medicinal properties.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Alcohol and its Role in the Evolution of Human Society by Ian S. Hornsey. Copyright © 2012 Ian S. Hornsey. Excerpted by permission of The Royal Society of Chemistry.
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