Alcohol and Humans

Humans and alcohol have shared a very long history. In this final chapter, we highlight some of the key findings that emerge from the chapters in this book, in particular the evolutionary history of our adaptation to alcohol consumption and the social role that alcohol consumption plays, and has played, in human societies across the world. This raises a major contradiction in the literature, namely the fact that, despite this long history, the medical profession typically views alcohol as destructive. We draw attention to several avenues that would repay future research and how humans’ relationship with alcohol stands to change and evolve.

Through the Drinking Glass

This chapter argues that drinking things are of central importance to our understanding of the long relationship between humans and alcohol. It explores the history of the English man (and woman’s) pint of beer, as an object, a drink, and a measure, from the late-sixteenth to the twenty-first century, to show how the relationships between objects, drinks, and measures have been socially and culturally constructed over time. Drawing upon a wide range of objects, images, and textual sources, and benefiting from the theoretical lenses of material performativity and praxeology, it argues that material insights not only help us to understand the deeper cultural processes at play in the routines and rituals of convivial drinking, but also help us to understand their wider role in social and political change.

The Earliest Toasts

The taste for alcohol is not exclusive to humans, as some other animal species are attracted to ripe fruits and nectar due to the natural occurrence of ethanol. However, what makes Homo sapiens different is their capacity to produce alcoholic beverages. From the Neolithic, if not earlier, the production of alcoholic drinks is documented, and this production ensured the supply of alcohol. Consequently, alcohol consumption was no longer sporadic and occasional. This process ran in parallel to the development of specific alcohol-related equipment, and organized drinking patterns gradually became more and more formalized. Its use has depended not only on its effects, mainly its capacity to enhance sociability, but also on historical, economic, and religious factors. The aim of this chapter is to search for the origins of this dynamic in prehistoric Europe from an archaeological perspective in order to explore the foundations of the cultural construction of alcohol.

The Nature of Sweetness

This chapter is an ethnographic case study of the fermentation of cassava beer among the indigenous Makushi people of southern Guyana. The chapter constitutes the first in-depth anthropological study of parakari, a unique kind of cassava beer fermented via the cultivation of a domesticated species of saprotrophic fungus (Rhizopus sp.). Herein, the author explores Makushi theories and practices of fermentation, and, more broadly, the ways in which alcoholic drinks operate as catalysts for processes of social and cosmic reproduction and transformation in indigenous Amazonia. For the Makushi, as it is argued, the production and consumption of cassava beer is understood as a more-than-human process of person-making, harnessing the vibrant agency of a diversity of vegetal, animal, microbial, and spiritual entities and forces. Fermentation, in this frame, is treated both as a sociotechnical system and an ecosystem.

Alcohol as Embodied Material Culture

Alcohol is the most widely used psychoactive agent in the world, and it has a very deep history. Human beings have demonstrated remarkable creativity in producing alcoholic beverages from a diverse array of substances. Many varieties of alcoholic drinks have substantial nutritional value and they often form a significant component of the diet of many peoples. Like other foods, alcohol is a form of ‘embodied material culture’; that is, a substance created to be destroyed through ingestion into the human body. Hence, it has close relationship to the inculcation and symbolization of concepts of identity. Alcoholic drinks are not reducible to a chemical substance with physiological effects: they are a form of material culture with almost unlimited possibilities for cultural variation and are a versatile symbolic medium and social tool crucial to ritual, politics, and the construction of social and economic relations.

Uncorking the Past

To substantiate and illustrate the centrality of molecular archaeology in bridging the divide between the natural sciences and the humanities, this chapter draws upon laboratory research on ‘fermentation’ and ‘ancient medicine’. Fermentation is probably the first energy system on Earth, which is embodied in the physiology of all animals including humans. It is probably the first biotechnology discovered and utilized by our species. In short, humans coevolved with microorganisms, then harnessed them to our purposes in many innovative ways—to provide alcohol as an energy source and for dissolving botanical compounds which have medicinal properties. Arguably, the most important fermentation system used by humankind was to make fermented beverages. As the universal medicine, social lubricant, mind-altering substance, religious symbol, artistic inspiration, and highly valued commodity, fermented beverages around the world became the focus of religious cults, pharmacopoeias, cuisines, economies, and society.

The Natural Biology of Dietary Ethanol, and its Implications for Primate Evolution

Ethanol derives from the fermentation of simple sugars, and fermentative yeasts are common within terrestrial ecosystems. Animals that routinely consume sugar-rich fruits and nectars thus chronically ingest low-level ethanol. The capacity to detect and follow ethanol plumes enables localization of ripe fruits and fermented nectars over long distances (as occurs in fruit flies); psychoactive responses to ethanol among vertebrate frugivores may increase net caloric gain during feeding via the aperitif effect. Paleogenetic reconstruction of enzymes involved in ethanol metabolism suggests sustained exposure of hominids (including the genus Homo) over the last 12 million years to dietary ethanol. Alcohol use by modern humans may thus derive from ancestral sensory biases associating ethanol consumption with nutritional reward (i.e. the ‘drunken monkey’ hypothesis). Detailed measurements of ethanol concentrations within fruit and nectar, together with behavioural, physiological, and genomic comparisons among frugivores and nectarivores, are now necessary to further test this hypothesis.

Chicha as Water

Since the agricultural revolution, traditional fermented beers served social and dietary functions, including hydration. There are longstanding customs of producing, consuming, and socializing with home-made beers. However, because they are time- and labour-intensive to produce, shifts away from traditional beers often occur with the introduction of market alcohols, which may not fulfil the dietary functions of traditional beers. This paper uses nine years of longitudinal data from 963 Tsimane’ Bolivian forager-horticulturalist adults to examine how the consumption of chicha, a traditional fermented beer, and market alcohol changed during a period of increased market integration from 2002 to 2010. It then uses cross-sectional dietary recall data with 45 adults to estimate chicha contributions to water intake. Our findings suggest that chicha consumption has decreased over time for women but not men. Chicha consumption, while more common, was strongly predictive of market alcohol consumption. Chicha contributed 1 litre to water needs for men and 0.6 litre for women. The increased drive to produce cash crops may not only limit the availability of preferred crops for chicha but also reduce the amount of time available to spend making chicha. Alternatives for making water more palatable, such as adding store-bought water flavouring powders, could further reduce traditional chicha consumption thereby having potential implications on daily social life and ripple effects on nutrition and hydration.

Hominoid Adaptation to Dietary Ethanol

Humans’ long association with alcohol raises questions about both our biological adaptations to handling ethanol and its origins. Fermented foods have less sugar, and require additional detoxification than unfermented versions of the same food, and are thus are generally inferior food choices. I summarize recent studies which indicate that our ability to exploit ethanol depends on several mutations in alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) enzymes that allow ethanol to be metabolized rapidly, thereby reducing the likelihood that the blood alcohol concentration reaches intoxicating levels. Genetic and biochemical analyses for a wide range of primate and non-primate species suggest that these mutations are shared primarily with the two African great apes (chimpanzees and gorillas). These mutations thus date back at least 10 million years, to a period when the tropical forests were contracting during a major episode of climate change. Mutations enabling rapid ethanol metabolism may have enabled ancestral apes to exploit otherwise toxic, ethanol-rich fermenting fruits on the forest floor that were metabolically inaccessible to their ecological competitors. These adaptations enabling exploitation of an inferior food suggest that modern proclivities towards ethanol consumption may derive from the utilization of fermented food as a particular type of fallback food. If so, the fermented fallback food hypothesis can be seen as a special case of the drunken monkey hypothesis.

Feasting and its Role in Human Community Formation

Feasting (the social consumption of food and alcoholic beverages) has long been a feature of human social life. Although the fermentation of alcoholic beverages probably dates back only as long as substantive vessels have been available (and hence probably much less than 100 000 years), it is likely that social feeding first emerged around 400 000 years ago when humans first mastered control over fire. It seems that feasting activates the same neurobiological mechanism that underpins social bonding in primates and humans, thereby adding to the list of behaviours that humans use for these purposes. The chapter presents data from two national stratified surveys (one for eating socially and the other for drinking socially) and show that both play an important role in facilitating our social networks, our sense of satisfaction with life, and engagement with our local communities. Since social networks are the single most important factor influencing our happiness, health, and well-being, feasting is likely to play a crucial role by determining the size of our social networks.