If you are civilized, blame Beer

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E. Michael Smith / Wikipedia

An Egyptian wooden model of beer making in ancient Egypt, located at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California.

Archeoblog links to an article saying:

Beer Lubricated the Rise of Civilization, Study Suggests

Could beer have helped lead to the rise of civilization? It’s a possibility, some archaeologists say. Their argument is that Stone Age farmers were domesticating cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads, by turning the grains into beer. That has been their take for more than 50 years, and now one archaeologist says the evidence is getting stronger.

Signs that people went to great lengths to obtain grains despite the hard work needed to make them edible, plus the knowledge that feasts were important community-building gatherings, support the idea that cereal grains were being turned into beer, said archaeologist Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada.