Posted on 09/16/2018 7:17:51 AM PDT by ETL
Researchers from the U.S. and Israel have found evidence of the world’s oldest beer-making in an Israeli cave.
Scientists studied three 13,000-year-old stone mortars uncovered in the Raqefet Cave near what is now the Israeli city of Haifa. Residues confirmed that the mortars were used for brewing of wheat and barley, as well as for food storage.
Experts from Stanford University and the University of Haifa participated in the research. “This accounts for the oldest record of man-made alcohol in the world,” said Li Liu, a professor of Chinese archaeology at Stanford, in a statement.
The cave formed part of a prehistoric graveyard used by the Natufian people, providing a clue to beer’s role in their culture.
Experts believe that the Natufians brewed beer as part of ritual feasts that honored the dead. “This discovery indicates that making alcohol was not necessarily a result of agricultural surplus production, but it was developed for ritual purposes and spiritual needs, at least to some extent, prior to agriculture,” said Liu.
The research, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, notes that the earliest bread remains discovered were recently uncovered from a Natufian site in Jordan. The bread remains could be between 11,600 and 14,600 years old, according to Liu, who says that beer findings could be from 11,700 to 13,700 years ago.
The Natufians likely used a three-stage brewing process that first turned the starch of wheat or barley into starch. The malt would then be mashed or heated and then left to ferment with airborne wild yeast.
Prehistoric beer, however, was quite unlike our modern brews, according to Jiajing Wang, a doctoral student at Stanford and co-author of the study. The Natufian brew was most likely a “multi-ingredient concoction like porridge or thin gruel,” the research says.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
*** “But watch the video I linked to to get a fuller appreciation of the importance of beer in human history” ***
This link works
Thanks for the link to the earlier thread on this story.
Ahhhhhhh...13,000 years...aged to perfection...
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