Official News page 8

REAL LIFE NEWS: BEER CAUSED CIVILIZATION

by Hazed

And yet more news about the dawn of time: it seems that beer may have helped to kickstart the rise of civilization.

Some archaeologists have suggested that stone age farmers who domesticated cereals were motivated not so much by the desire to fill their stomachs, as to get intoxicated, by turning the grains into beer. Actually this supposition is nothing new - it's been around for about 50 years - but now one archaeologist says the evidence has got stronger.

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

"Beer is sacred stuff in most traditional societies," said Hayden, who is planning to submit research on the origins of beer to the journal Current Anthropology. And in may modern pubs, too! As Homer Simpson says, "Ah, beer. The cause of and the solution to all of life's problems."

You can read more about this theory here.

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