“Alcohol and caffeine created civilization” | Hacker News Reader

“Alcohol and caffeine created civilization”

usatoday.com

155 pointsrmason146 comments

There's nothing new about the "beer theory of civilization", although this article doesn't really explain it very well.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of it is that it explains how we domesticated crops in the first place. Consider the wild antecedent of maize(corn): teosinte. It's basically grass. It's "cobs", if they can truly even be called that, are tiny. You simply couldn't settle down and try to grow this stuff and be able to actually feed yourself. The yield of edible material is just too tiny. You'd spend more calories growing the stuff than you'd get back out of it. It took thousands of years of selective breeding to yield a crop that would make agriculture viable, so how the hell did we do that when there were no farmers?

Beer.

While it's not practical to settle in one spot and try to grow teosinte for food, it is possible to gather up enough wild teosinte to make a small amount of chicha (a fermented drink similar to beer). Tedious and painful, but possible. Hunter-gatherers who developed a taste for chicha likely learned they could save time by saving some of the seeds they gathered and scattering them in areas where they'd grow well. Return to the same spot in a year and the next batch of chicha will be easier to make! Selective breeding was a next step.

The important notion here is that, because they were making chicha, these hunter-gatherers had motivation to save themselves time and effort without actually having to rely on a crop that was not able to feed them enough calories to pay back the effort expended on it. Thus, humans didn't have to magically peer thousands of years into the future and start domesticating crops so that agriculture would one day become possible. They just had to like beer and be lazy.

> They just had to like beer and be lazy.

Fortunately, this is something that ancient & modern men alike excel at!

It is kinda funny to think that a prime reason for us developing advanced societies, civilisation & technology is also a prime factor in damage to society, uncivilised behaviour & destruction.

Or as Homer Simpson said, "Alcohol, the cause and solution to all of life's problems!"

more likely the huge difference in the distribution of consumption in the population is responsible. I mean, no car accidents without roads

at least in the beginning, more likely then premediated spreading the seeds is accidentally planting in dung, if you know what I mean.

This seems an inane and oversimplified view. Sure, coffee would have helped. But ignoring colonization, and its huge positive impact on Western Europe and negative impact elsewhere, and concluding that industrialization is a corollary of a stimulant is strange.

I think these kind of "historians" rarely bother to place themselves in historical context. This article seems right in the much derided class of insight porn articles. I believe history is not the result of "one minor cause" - you could write articles equally myopic that the Chinese invention of sailing against the wind created civilization, gunpowder created civilization, double-entry bookkeeping created civilization, steam power created civilization, better glasswork and telescopes created civilization, etc. It was not one thing by itself, but probably everything together.

The only argument i ever really bought was the origin of agriculture. and even that is pretty suspect, but i still think it's a decent argument.

10,000 years ago, pretty much everyone was a hunter gatherer. Humans can survive on pretty much anything from seeds to whales. There's not really much need to control the environment to maintain a food source in that context. Yes, there will be lean years, yes there are other populations you're in competition with (but they could also be food...)

In any case, the argument goes, somebody stumbled on fermentation. The desire for regular access to whatever plant got you drunk might actually be enough to become a farmer. It's tough to say. I think it's plausible, and probably part of the whole story.

Hunter gatherers were healthier and longer lived than their farming counterparts. I think that's still true of the few hunter gatherer cultures that remain. Food security is a good reason, but for a human, especially a hunter gatherer, everything is food. Alcohol security though, that's a pretty compelling argument. Perhaps not for you personally, but i'm sure you've met people that would agree. Addiction is powerful.

Also domestication could have had a part, once you have a herd nomadic life is much harder and you need to tend to pastures.

Domestication also explains, why development has been slower in Africa. They had nothing to domesticate.

Is this a testable claim? Were, say, sheep progenitors easier to domesticate than ibexes or antelope or okapi?

Well there's the American Natives, which are a conundrum because they both had hard animals to work with (I think they did manage to domesticate turkeys, but not buffaloes) but some still managed to farm and hybridize crops.

many points are debated here, there are also some links to start https://www.quora.com/Farming-Why-didnt-the-Native-Americans...

disclaimer: I know nothing of the subject and my initial hunch was pure conjecture.

It's a claim made by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Wikipedia has a pretty well cited section on "Behavioural preadaptation"[0] however I can't speak to its accuracy as I haven't read any of the literature.

I'd be pretty interested in seeing a domesticatability comparison of the guanaco (wild predecessor of the domesticated llama still in existence today) vs. the zebra.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_animals#Behav...

There was a story on HN a few months ago. I do not have a reference, but it said, that all the African animals are either to dangerous or to fast. There are no horse, cow or pig equivalents. Some might seem like it but are actually not (like Zebras, look like horses, are actually very different).

There is a pleasurable aspect of "getting drunk", but I personally wouldn't discount the food security angle either. Which is why I feel the "alcohol created civilization" argument is overkill. Fermented food can be stored for much longer times than fresh food. It's no surprise that many other non-alcoholic fermented foods have ancient histories. Same with other simple means of preservation (such as cured meat).

To give an example: Ancient beer (as mentioned in the Wiki on ancient Egyptian cuisine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_cuisine) was likely cloudy with lots of grain parts (not strained), and thus more nutritious than today's filtered beers. Even notwithstanding the hunter-gatherer aspect, I can see something appealing about having a source of readily available nutrition that you don't have to work for once prepared. With an added bonus that it can be transported over large distances, even to places where no food is available at all.

I don't entirely discount the "pleasure" angle, of course -- history after all records many examples of other psychoactive plants used since ancient times -- but in most cases, they are not food and were primarily used for ritual, medical, or social purposes. (This is still the case today.) The USA Today article is on a bit stronger ground when describing the coffee house's role in the Enlightenment.

> and negative impact elsewhere

This is factually incorrect.

The USA, Canada, Australia and NewZealand we're colonies.

Certainly under British rule colonisation had a hugely positive impact.

For the Europeans, who moved there. The original inhabitants might think different. In their point of view, these colonies actually were the most devastating.

But leaving aside whether the advantages accrued to one ethnic group or another, didn't colonization increase the economic output on those land masses?

Overall, I mean (unquestionably it was destructive too).

I can speak about India. India went from controlling 25% of the world's output in the 1500s to controlling 2% of the world's output in 1947. Till about 1900, Indians were banned from starting industries. Just so that you don't think that Indians had no industries, the first Fellow of the Royal Society from India was a shipbuilder [1]. British colonization was devastating for Indian commerce. You can argue that it is only now hobbling back to normalcy.

On balance, British did introduce railways, which was instrumental in unifying the country, and a unified legal system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardaseer_Cursetjee

smallpox riddled Native Americans might want a word with you

Absolutely. Almost no major historic events or developments had one single cause.

No event period has a single cause. In order to hit a pool ball with another pool ball, you need to create the universe first. It sounds pedantic, but you can't always find more than one reasonable cause for any event. Aristotle named four, but there's always more than that.

    > No two drugs have defined human civilization the 
    > way alcohol and caffeine have.

Tobacco?

As much as one can quantify it, I'd argue it played as large a role as coffee up until a few decades ago. Possibly larger.

Not that I'm planning on starting :)

Once you factor is the geopolitical effects due to cash crop trade and production, I think you'd certainly be right.

Not a drug, but wars have been fought over spice (in real life).

But don't be forgetting Dune or Dune II. It was so fantastic.

in real life, too ;-)

Salt too!

Tobacco and Coffee were both discovered in the new world. Civilization is much older than either of these discoveries by Europeans for Europeans. It was used by Indigenous Americans up to 1000 BC. But no one else knew about it.

Coffee is from Ethiopia. Maybe you're thinking of chocolate.

No you are right. But again coffee wasn't discovered by Europeans until around that same time mid to late 1500s. Civilization is much older than that.

It's an interest story/legend as to how coffee got introduced to Europe, left behind by the retreating Ottoman army at Vienna. Resulted, apparently, in the invention of the croissant too. The ends don't justify the means, but that's a lot more productive that many recent conflicts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_III_Sobieski

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viennese_coffee_house

Opium is also pretty important. The Opium Wars had a major influence on China.

Tea is another, and the various spices that were traded.

tea basically drove colonial mercantilism for the UK.

Wasn't that also the driver for American Independence ?

It was a focal point but I couldn't call it a major driver in and of itself. To the degree that it represented trade restraint and taxation issues, sure, but people didn't actually start a war and found a new nation because of the contents of their teacup.

> Tobacco?

Doesn't fit the narrative!

On a side note I think I read or heard something along the lines of tobacco leaves being used as currency in the early westernised North America?

Edit: http://archive.tobacco.org/History/colonialtobacco.html

Caffeine (and other stimulants) have been traded by many civilizations over many millennia in different areas of the world, and have not always given rise to technological progress. In addition, progress in the methods of creating alcohol have often been a side-effect of growing civilizations, not a cause for them.

The article makes an argument that here we humans were, dumb and boring, and suddenly we decided to create a means to produce certain products, and then we created trade routes for these products, and then suddenly this caused civilization to flourish, as if the presence of civilization was not necessary for these things to happen to begin with. It's like saying "the horseless carriage developed America", as if America didn't exist before it was created, to say nothing of paved roads.

Clickbaity clickbait.

This article title is quite the outrageous claim akin to clickbait, claim that's not substantiated in the article content.

Actually the content says: "research suggests that alcohol may have helped create civilization itself" which is far from what the titles claims but fails to provide source about this supposed research.

Reading this felt like a piece of entertainment based on opinion, much confusion and stuff that does not make much sense: in times before humans could purify water and prepare food but they somehow where able to brew beer, correlation of events made into causal link and so on.

How does this kind of crap gets to HN front page ?

"The History of the World in Six Glasses" by Tom Standage lays out a similar time line. He breaks the world into two sections - alcohol and caffeine - and each of those into three periods: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and soda.

Each period be described how the drink became so important. It's a very interesting and quick read.

https://books.google.com/books/about/A_History_of_the_World_...

> "... Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and stimulated, rather than relaxed and mildly inebriated, and the quality and quantity of their work improved … Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries.”

That's quite a claim. So did prior high-tech civilizations have equivalents? Tea in China, of course. But others?

For what it's worth, as recently as early 17th century England did not have coffee. If you grant that the difference in caffeine between coffee and tea is significant, then we can conclude that Western Europe must have received those benefits only by the 1650's - 1700's.

Source:

    25. The Turks use likewise a kind of herb, called " coffee,"
    which they dry, grind to powder, and drink in warm water. They affirm
    that it gives no small vigour both to their courage and their wit.
    Yet this taken in large quantities will excite and disturb the mind;
    which shows it to be of a similar nature to opiates.

from Francis Bacon in The History of Life and Death, published in 1638 posthumously. You can read the full work here: http://www.sirbacon.org/historylifedeath.htm

The Industrial Revolution started around 1760 in Britain, so the timeline looks plausible.

The Turks already had coffee, so why the industrial revolution didn't start there earlier?

How was Turkish astronomy at the time? Physics were a great enabler of machine building.

Was it? I was under impression that a lot of it was trial and error by tinkerers (Edison-style, but a couple centuries earlier). For example, was there that much (or any, for that matter) physics in the invention of the loom?

On the invention, not that much. On the mass production, yes, a lot.

The Wealth of Nations has some interesting anecdotes about Newton's work helping industries. (But it's been a long time since I've read it, so no pointers.)

I'd say the clear answer is that we can't boil down entire world movements to a single factor.

Most of the rest Europe also had coffee when Britain had it, so why didn't they also start it?

I'm far from an expert on this history, but I have read that Britain probably got there first because of institutions that favored free enterprise, such as rule of law and private property rights.

I'm guessing Turkey did not score as highly on those measures.

I'm no authority but I wonder if he is misunderstanding Turkish coffee (especially as they left sacks of beans behind at Vienna not too much later). Turkish coffee sometimes has ground up herbs added to it, which could cause confusion to the observer? There is a pretty well documented use of coffee beans in Turkish coffee earlier than the date you cite, so I wonder what is going on?

Everyone favourite source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_coffee

Bacon used here a more expansive definition of "herb": "a plant derivative that has flavor" rather than "something you'll find in your spice rack". The fact that coffee comes from beans wasn't relevant to his argument.

Thanks, I miss read that as calling something else coffee.

The Sateré-Mawé people of the Amazon domesticated and perfected the processing and imbibing of guaraná over centuries, and an extensive trade network of the product even grew in the area, but they did not develop into an advanced civilization. Moreover, products like guaraná, coffee and tea have been ritualized and developed into a social practice, identical to the Europeans once coffee houses were introduced to western cities in the 17th century.

Whether it be coffee in Yemen [and later western Europe], tea in China [and later Japan], or guaraná in the Amazon, each product has been revered by its culture in some form. They were adopted into the culture as they were discovered and developed, but they did not inspire some grand change in the technological progress of the civilization. Coffee leaves were boiled and drank for close to 300 years before some sultan's cook had the bright idea to roast and grind the beans and cook them in water.

I think it's not so much claiming that coffee helped them, but rather being sober helped them.

I think I have heard of this thing called "the renaissance" :-)

Interesting. My first thought was, "well, they've certainly helped create hundreds if not thousands of startups."

It certainly created the very first start-up: The idea of growing crops. To a hunter-gatherer the very idea seemed stupid, so much time spent planting and tilling when you could go out and beat something with a club and have dinner in minutes.

You can't really forage for alcohol. You have to farm it.

Then the hunter-gatherers were probably interested in trading for alcohol and the economy was born.

Those are some really wild unsubstantiated guesses :^)

But like Jared Diamond it is entertaining.

Sounds like a good start to a http://bahfest.com/ submission!

Fallen fruit can ferment and apparently it's not uncommon for wild animals to get drunk from it. So you can forage for alcohol ;)

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-alcoholics-...

There was a cherry tree in the backyard of a house I used to live in and every year the fruit would get funky and ferment. Birds and squirrels would make a habit of eating it and the backyard would be filled birds all flopping around and squirrels trying but mostly failing to find their way up trees. They knew what they were getting into, and they indulged. For about one week a year it was like a frat house out there.

I can imagine people discovered the principle there, but brewing on a more industrial scale is necessary to provide a steady supply. Just about anything can be fermented, but that proecess takes time to do properly. It's a form of farming.

So yeah, you can forage for it, but you'll get so little it's barely worth the trouble.

Pretty sure agriculture developed for many reasons, including that this was far from true:

> you could go out and beat something with a club and have dinner in minutes

What concentration of alcohol has to be in water to make it resistant to getting stale? E.g. if I have ethanol and drinkable water, how much should I add to get the water protected from the bacteria without turning it into a serious alcoholic drink?

There's no fixed threshold. It depends on the alcohol tolerance of the microbes that happen to be present. 2% ABV might make a noticeable difference. 20% ABV will probably last forever.

However, it's not just the alcohol acting as a preservative, it's also the yeast using up other things microbes need, such as nitrogen sources ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeast_assimilable_nitrogen ). 100% malt beer wort usually contains more than the yeast needs, but fruit juice, honey, and adjunct-heavy beer wort can have lower levels, and even in the 100% malt case the yeast might be able to use all of it. The yeast will use up vitamins and minerals too. It can be a problem if it means the yeast stops working before all the sugar is fermented ("stuck fermentation"), but adding excessive nutrients is also bad, because they'll make the final product more hospitable to other microbes.

> "and the quality and quantity of their work improved"

I've always said that I owe my career, what there is of it, to caffeine. I guess I wasn't kidding.

>I've always said that I owe my career, what there is of it, to #DRUGOFCHOICE. I guess I wasn't kidding.

Kinda weird how caffeine, still technically a drug like speed/ritalin/adderal etc, is so accepted in today's society. Sorry if I'm mixing up drugs with active ingredients I know very little about drugs.

You'd think you should be more confused about how alcohol is as accepted as it is.

I feel more pity for the way people still want to impose control over other folks life – and quietly dream of the day more people accepted that substance abuse is the problem, not the substances themselves (and gave more room for personal responsibility and different choices in life). I personally don't see a fundamental difference in people turning away from society for e.g. spiritual reasons, or because they want to get high, but think they should only do so if they can afford it wholly by themselves. (I do accept if assistance – financial, etc.. - comes with obligations.)

I know I owe my career to adderall.

The "beer as a safe alternative to water" is likely a myth. See https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yts0v/comme...

It's likely a myth with regard to the middle ages, but what about ancient times --ie Roman, Greek, Egyptian, etc? These places had urban centers.

Ancient (specifically Roman) civilizations had fantastic systems to transport water and even developed indoor plumbing. They didn't need to augment their water quality with wine. Wine was simply made ubiquitous due to their civilization determining that it should be enjoyed by everyone.

Of course there are stories of soldiers augmenting pond water with wine, but this could have been as much to make it more palatable as preventing oneself from getting sick.

Here's a paper that talks about Ancient thoughts on water: https://issuu.com/eajournal/docs/articulo_-_van_tillburg_-_d... Basically, humans have for a really freaking long time been able to determine whether water is basically more or less safe to drink, and have not really worried about it more than any other thing (and certainly not drank beer or wine because they feared for the quality of the water)

A counterexample is cholera.

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/choleratheories.html

Is it? I don't see how 19th century cholera outbreaks have anything to do with ancient civilisations.

Because cholera existed before the 19th century, and people didn't understand that contaminated water was the cause?

So as late as the 19th century, people were just drinking regular water, believing there was nothing wrong with it. (This, plus the fountains and wells that have existed since antiquity as public places to both drink water and wash your hands... eww)

Cholera only existed in the old world and is a byproduct of animal domestication and urbanization[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk

If they had urban centers, then they had civilization already debunking the claim.

Can we please have a higher standard of truth than a Reddit comment, especially one that doesn't cite any sources? I am not saying the linked comment is wrong but why should I believe it over anything else?

A comment by a flaired user in /r/AskHistorians is a very different thing to a "Reddit comment".

Yes, but it's just a reddit comment none the less with no way to backtrack to peer reviewed work.

We've all learnt that "peer reviewed work" is code for "accept other peoples papers so they will accept ours" and has nothing to do with confirming the finding.

Are you implying that we should just accept peer reviewed work and Reddit comments as equally valid? I don't disagree with you, peer-review is no guarantee of proof but I assign more weight to it than an upvote. Especially if I can read the work myself and investigate further sources.

Don't throw the baby away with the bathwater.

Peer reviewed publications offers the only venue for accountable reporting on complex subjects.

By definition this mean "accountability to peers" and is the only mechanism which outsiders can use to gauge the credibility of claims.

Like all things humans do that is not pure maths, it's not perfect but the best we have.

I think his point is the fact that /r/AskHistorians comments are usually sourced properly and are strictly moderated.

But this one isn't so it doesn't get the benefit of the doubt based on higher quality peers.

/r/AskHistorians may be a fine place to discuss history but without sources the comments can be treated as nothing more than opinion.

It isn't though. Without sources it's still just a Reddit comment. We should have higher standards than this.

> a Reddit comment, especially one that doesn't cite any sources?

That Reddit comment is literally saying "[the claim that beer was safer than water] cannot be substantiated with primary sources". You're complaining that somebody isn't citing sources when all they are saying is that there is a lack of evidence that the claim is true. You're placing the burden of proof in the wrong place.

The GP claim is that "beer as a safe alternative to water" is likely a myth. In order to back this up they linked to a comment that does nothing to prove this claim.

Sure, the Reddit comment says there is no primary source evidence to back up the claim that beer was used as a safe alternative to water but that does not make it a source to claim that beer was not used as a safe alternative to water.

Furthermore, the Reddit post makes unsubstantiated claims, such as "failing many logic tests" without naming the logic tests themselves. The entire second paragraph is predicated on the assumption that homesteads used only clean water sources without polluting them. How did they handle waste? Did they know how far from water sources to deposit their waste? The comment doesn't say.

Indeed the burden of proof is on the accuser and in this case the GP is the accuser. Reddit comments do not meet my standard for proof.

I think what we're all trying to say is, could you provide any evidence for the "beer as a safe alternative to water" theory? If we place the burden of proof on the skeptical "accuser", that could redeem almost any theory about history, including the more colorful ones involving aliens.

Someone on HN made a claim that the idea of beer as a clean drinking source was a myth and cited a Reddit comment as a source. This is unacceptable to me because that Reddit comment cites no further sources and raises other concerns.

I would apply the same rigor to a claim that beer was used as an alternate drinking supply.

Internet comments are just that, commentary. The same as the opinion piece in a newspaper. If they are to be used as fact they must meet a much higher standard or be disregarded. It is not acceptable to cite one opinion as proof of another.

Well the article does not provide any source to its claims, does not even attempt to prove anything, yet you accept USA today repeating something as a proof that "beer was a safe alternative to water". Is it even as established fact that water was unsafe to drink ? if so where ? when ?

Unsafe water in large overcrowded cities such 19th century London is proven but an exception not the general situation for the whole world over time.

I make no claim to the validity of the USA Today article. Unsubstantiated claims should not be countered with other unsubstantiated claims. I am simply calling for a higher level of proof.

the fact that teetotal sailors where considered a higher insurance risk which can be backed up with sources

Try using common sense here. It is self-evident that water had a long history of being drank before beer came to be, that you can't replace drinking water by drinking beer, and lastly that water was safer to drink before we started putting shit in it.

Your invocation of common sense is insulting.

What part of drinking water makes it self-evident that it was drank before beer? Additionally, how does it establish a long history? You seem to cite your entire comment as a source for the extraordinary claim that drinking water has no substitute and that adding things to water only makes it worse.

Are you saying that any additive to drinking water is harmful?

> What part of drinking water makes it self-evident that it was drank before beer?

You're taking skepticism to absurd levels. Water is naturally occurring. Beer is not.

The linked article is pop-history clickbait. The comment I linked is not a peer review article, granted, but it's a statement by a verified accredited specialist in History of Alcohol. Since I don't have time or expertise to do in depth research, I think I'll take this comment.

Besides, most of the comments in this thread are positing wild guesses and making spurious claims. If you didn't complain about the article or those comments you have no right to complain about my link not being a high standard of truth :^)

I do not accept subreddits as a source of anything beyond Reddit commentary itself. They are opinion pieces unless they include sources.

The quality of comments in this thread are entirely irrelevant to the comment you linked. I apply the same standard to all internet comments.

If you wish to deflect that is on you but I stand by my standard of truth.

Lack of clean water is a huge issue today, much less in historic times before germ theory. Anyone who says otherwise is stunningly ignorant. That they so blithely claim otherwise tells me that they don't know what they're talking about.

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/diseases-risks/en...

This chapter of Calestous Juma's new book on pushbacks around innovations has a fascinating chapter about how coffee and coffeehouses were like a kind of social media product that got banned and unbanned from its introduction in the 1500s Middle East to Europe and USA: https://books.google.com/books?id=i5dHDAAAQBAJ&q=Coffee#v=sn...

As Yang Wenli says... "Alcohol is humanity's friend. Can I abandon a friend? Humans were drinking alcohol five thousand years ago. And they're still drinking it now. And five thousand years from now, they'll be drinking alcohol. Although it's unlikely there will be a human race in five thousand years." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_YxauHnpyg)

I don't partake, and think if any drug ought to be illegal it should be alcohol for the damage it has caused, but then I wonder what humanity would look like if our brains didn't respond to it any more than water.

The article briefly mentions a new study done on mice that can "affect the mind as adversely as cocaine." But nowhere (that I can find) is the study cited. Can anyone find the study or does anyone know what study is being cited?

10M years ago a primate developed ability to efficiently metabolize alcohol and that primate became common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. So, yes, alcohol was key ingredient that led to creation of our civilization.

Gastropod has a really neat episode where they talk the history of coffee and caffeine and how it came to (and changed) Europe.

https://gastropod.com/caffeine/

Or rather "alcohol bad, caffeine good". The author is from Cato Institute - are they planning to bring Prohibition back now? Anyway here are a few major holes in the story.

- "People drank alcohol because it was safer than water". If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it. A lot simpler than beer brewing.

- "People became smarter after the Englightenment and started drinking coffee instead of alcohol". How about drinking coffee in addition to alcohol? The coffee houses developed in parallel with the beer houses, not instead of them. We recently had an article on HN that made the point that alcohol consumption actually increased in the 19th century.

- "Adam Smith was so smart because he drank coffee". He also drank lots of wine - preferably Bordeaux (or claret, as they called it in Scotland). Some of the most bitter passages in Wealth of Nations are directed against the British government using taxation to promote port wine (Portugal was a British ally) over claret (France was usually an enemy).

> "People drank alcohol because it was safer than water". If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it. A lot simpler than beer brewing.

Easy to say when you know about germ theory.

> The coffee houses developed in parallel with the beer houses, not instead of them. We recently had an article on HN that made the point that alcohol consumption actually increased in the 19th century.

The usage was very different though wasn't it? With beer halls people weren't drinking when they were working, they were drinking after work.

> Easy to say when you know about germ theory.

You don't need to be a weatherman to go out and look at the weather.

But you do need a microscope to look at germs.

India has had civilization for as long as anybody and drinking was prohibited in the culture, or at least not encouraged. So these are just generalized stories created from history they have no basis to make a grandiose claim that a tool created civilization, a tool is a tool it allows you do solve certain problems, there are different tools that solve the same problems for instance boiling. There are other stimulants than caffeine. Nothing substantial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_filters#Ancie...

Citation needed for "drinking was prohibited in the culture".

Local varieties of alcohol are plentiful across the country, and not limited to just palm wine. There are more than enough references to alcohol in ancient literature, not all of them condemnatory in nature.

Much of the prohibition movement happened around the time of the struggle for Independence from British Rule. For example, search for "kallu kadai mariyal" (Tamil, literally, blockading a toddy shop).

https://www.quora.com/What-does-Hinduism-say-about-consuming...

In the Mahabharata, Shukracharya due to his alcoholism caused Kacha to be killed, ground up and mixed in his alcohol by the Asuras. After going through an ordeal of having to teach Kacha the secret Sanjivani knowledge, Shukracharya came to his senses, and pronounced these sayings on drinking:

यो ब्राह्मणो अद्य प्रभृतीह कश्चिन्मोहात्सुरां पास्यति मन्दबुद्धिः।

अपेतधर्मो ब्रह्महा चैव स स्यादस्मिँल्लोके गर्हितः स्यात्परे च ॥

“Whoever foolish brahmana henceforth drinks alcohol out of delusion, he should be considered as devoid of dharma, a killer of brahmanas, and should be forever despised in this world and the next.”

This is as far as Brahmins are concerned. However, since Vedic times there have been special yajnas for Kshatriyas where drinking is done in a restricted way so as to allow them to indulge in their vices but in a controlled way. I believe the yajna in which drinking is allowed is either Rajasuya or Sautramani.

The Dharma shastras (law books) by default condemn alcoholism for any person regardless of occupation. However, in consideration of physical exertion and exhaustion of Kshatriyas and Shudras, alcohol is allowed for them to bring some relaxation and relief of pain.

> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it.

I think the problem is that you can't store a barrel of water in the cellar for months. But you can do it with wine (and water it down with fresh water).

Why would want to store a barrel of water when you're a pastoral nomad or when your settlement it close to several fresh water sources ?

> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it.

All we have to do is boil it, because we have a germ theory. If i'd been drinking from the same well for 30 years, I don't think I'd make the connection that the water was somehow bad unless it tasted funny or was cloudy.

However, if i acquire a taste for tea, a good fraction of my water is automatically purified.

Alcohol, of course, is a nice way to store those hard grown calories. Grapes don't last long, wheat gets infested with bugs and rats. Beer and wine keep for a while. And of course, also purified.

Archaic doesn't mean stupid. We are all lucky John Snow was so diligent. That was a tough connection to make. And of course, once it was discovered, people regularly boil water when there are issues with the local water supply.

We got kind of lucky by getting addicted to things that inadvertently had unknown positive effects. Which, in my humble, non immunologist or doctor kind of way, probably outweighed the really terrible negative effects of long term massive alcohol consumption.

Did anyone live long enough to die of long term massive alcohol consumption?

i think average lifespan was historically low because of infant mortality, and childhood deaths. If you made it to 20, you had good odds of making it to 60. Socrates was like 70. In order to die of something like that, you'd have to be pretty darn wealthy, i'd think. First, rich enough to survive childhood, and then rich enough to drink a lot.

Yes. It's a misunderstanding of the life expectancy metric to believe people lives were short. Actually if you made it into adulthood chances are you would live and grow old.

The short life expectancy is due to a high risk of death as a baby or child.

Seems life expectancy of 70 years was considered normal a couple thousand years ago: https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Psalms-90-10/

Edit: never thought I'd be quoting the bible here as evidence of something

All this in addition to the logistics of simply boiling some water compared to the wine and beer.

Water was a somewhat precious resource for most folks. You either fetched it from the well or from the source plus have a fire to heat the water over - a fire that you aren't going to need for that day's food. Not to mention that you might need to do this for your family of 6 and doing the rest of your chores - all of which took much more work than today.

the beer or wine would have likely been delivered by horse and wagon if one purchased it. Otherwise, it likely would have been produced and stored on-site - the fetching would have been a bit different.

Also this neglects the fact that beer was a way to store water. If you simply boil water and store it in a clay pot someplace, it is possible for it to become infected again due to the container having small openings. Beer solved this problem allowing for transportable, safe, ready to drink fluids.

> Water was a somewhat precious resource for most folks.

Again, this is not true. Water only became a scarce resource for some when population density reached a certain point.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yts0v/comme...

"are they planning to bring Prohibition back now?"

Prohibition never ended, it just switched to targets with less public sympathy.

War on a drugs, esp. On Cannabis, is a good example of prohibition with the crime it generates.

Indeed. We've just changed it to the war on (some) drugs (when consumed by certain people).

> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it.

That's not necessarily true. Boiling will protect you from ingesting live parasites or bacteria, but it will not protect you from potential toxins that might have been produced by the bacteria. It will not protect you from pollutions like heavy metals either, but neither will alcohol.

Alcohol would have the advantage over boiling water that the bacteria would not be in the alcohol in the first place so they could not have produced something bad for you in the water. Also, as someone else pointed out, if you don't understand why some water makes you sick, and don't understand how to treat the water to keep it safe, how are you gonna start boiling water? Does it give you something beneficial apart from the not yet made connection of safety? no.

What gives alcohol the big advantage here is that the safety-thing is a side-effect. People drank because they liked it, and the hypothesis is they also gained better survival because it happened to have antiseptic features as well.

> Alcohol would have the advantage over boiling water that the bacteria would not be in the alcohol in the first place so they could not have produced something bad for you in the water.

This might hold for liquor (depending on what destillation removes and retains), but 90-95% of beer is boiled water and the bacteria would most definitely have been in there in the first place.

I actually enjoy brewing beer in my spare time. You're right in that it is a lot of water in beer, but if you had a contamination of bacteria in an early batch you would get the problem of the bacteria competing with the yeast. If the contamination is introduced after a certain point of fermentation, newly introduced bacteria would no longer get a hold because of the alcohol levels.

So in short, you are correct in that if you start brewing with contaminated water you will get the same problem in the end product.

Boiling water is difficult when you're gathering your own firewood and may not have metal bowls.

> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it. A lot simpler than beer brewing

Err no. You brew it and store it and it remains fine. You then need to store it cleanly for a period. Not to mention then the mechanism of contamination was unknown.

- "People drank alcohol because it was safer than water"

This has literally never been proven to be true. Just one of the myths invented recently.

It's interesting that you use quotes that don't appear in the text, because if passing those messages was the intention of the writer they succeeded beautifully.

Given that the Cato institute is strongly in favor of legalization, I doubt they want to ban alcohol.

If I recall, gin was the crack/meth of its day, in the 18th century. As immortalized in Hogarth's Gin Lane.

tea is awesome. In the US peeps don't drink it because there isn't any good ones available... this is crazy, not even trader joe's or new seasons carry good ones. I drink herbal teas every day, and during my time in the US it's one of the things I missed the most. Also, maybe this is only me, but coffee gives me diarrhea.. lol

it's likely that it's not diarrhea exactly it's just that caffeine (in any form coffee is just the most concentrated that most people drink) promotes/causes peristalsis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Side_effects

"In the US peeps don't drink it because there isn't any good ones available"

The internet has taken care of that. Also, the Canadians have been supplying us with Red Rose for more than a century, which, while not top of the line, is a highly acceptable everyday bag tea.

Also, you can get PG Tips pretty much everywhere.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not holding up RedRose and PG as the pinnacle of teadom - they're just very acceptable and available widely.

A Chinese friend of mine brought me what he said was very high quality tea when he went back to China to visit his parents. I like tea, but I honestly couldn't tell the difference between it and the stuff I get at the supermarket.

Alcohol consumers and old people tell the truth. Youth are not able to decipher the truth, even if they do they cannot tell.

Not true. No alcohol in Islamic sphere. No caffeine in East Asia. You still got civilizations developed.

Civilization had already developed there before Islam became a thing. And yes, they did drink alcoholic drinks too.

I'm pretty sure Islam came about after civilization had been established.

People drink alcohol because it's a social lubricant. Mostly to ease acceptance or improve the chance of sex.

And coffee because of fatigue.

It's not rocket science. It has not "created civilization", merely compensated civilization flaws.

I say, people created civilization, take That. Logic.

But "cannabis and psilocybin created religion"

http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/BOT135/Lect20b.htm

If Homo sapiens survived because of alcohol and coffee, monkey survived because of skills, then who is smarter? Not author of this article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com