– It is the desire to get drunk that made people come together and start doing things in an organized way such as agriculture, claims the philosopher Edward Slingerland in his book “Drunk”, where he presents research from many areas as support for his thesis.
For example, that alcohol intoxication affects the brain so that adults become more creative like children and find it harder to lie. Alcohol then builds trust between people, according to Slingerland. In the short term, alcohol also reduces stress and anxiety. Those advantages were crucial for people to dare to trust strangers and build a civilization, according to Slingerland. The downside, he points out, is the risk of becoming ill and addicted.
Alcohol brewing since the Stone Age
Archaeological findings indicate that humans have been brewing beer for 10,000 years, according to Robin Dunbar, retired professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford. He has researched for decades about how the human history of alcohol consumption began.
“Probably the sowing of barley and wheat began to make beer, rather than bread,” says Dunbar.
The balance is upset with alcohol
Both Dunbar and Slingerland think that alcohol, on the whole, has been beneficial to human development despite all its downsides. But with the invention of distilling into spirits, the balance has been upset.
– If you take shots of vodka, you can quickly reach over one per thousand of alcohol in the blood, unlike with beer and wine. So alcohol is much more dangerous now than it was historically with just natural fermentation. It is possible that alcohol has become more dangerous than it is worth in our modern world where there is no longer the same social control around drinking, concludes Slingerland, who is a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
See The alcohol experiments about the gene change 10 million years ago that makes us tolerate alcohol better than many other animals, which in turn led to the success of our species, in the World of Science, SVT Play August 20 and in SVT2 at 20.00 August 21.