Did we invent beer?

I had heard of beer in Sumer, but this pushes the dates back a couple of thousand years. 

Wasn't that the movie with Sigourney Weaver playing Dian Fossey?

And let's be clear about this "...only apparently used as part of burial rituals." So...they found remains of beer in a grave. Did it ever occur to them that they were giving this guy a big beer-bash send-off with dancing girls and all? Someone obviously puked in the grave. Scholars. No imagination.

Yep, and the more scholarly the less imagination, or sense of irony.

Did you guy hear that the grandson of George Orwell has approved an updated edition of 1984 with a woman named Julia as the main character who is completely bought into the woke society?

They see no irony in rewriting 1984 to fit today's wokeness. 

I think they have things backwards.  Yes, making beer requires a somewhat more complex social structure than taking a drink out of the Jordan river. But I think they have it backwards. The social structure had to reach a certain level before beer could be produced. Not that beer made the social structure more complex. 

Oh I can't wait. Indeed, the lack of self-awareness it would take to write a "woke" version of 1984. I would read it like a comedy. In fact, it's possible it will be very unintentionally funny.

Like everything, it is easy once one knows how to do it. It was certainly not so easy 7-14,000 years ago. Someone had to be the first to figure it out.  It may have been different people at different times and places figuring it out independently. 

The most difficult step was probably learning how to cultivate barley or some other grain in order to have the basic ingredient. Of course, it is possible that someone took some wild grain and worked with that. But making the step from harvested barley to beer was genius. 

We live in a technical age where things are produces elsewhere and shipped to our doors. Even as little as 200 years ago people were more dependent on what they could produce in their own homes than purchasing from somewhere else. most Americans lived in rural areas and could make a fire, dress a deer, build a shelter and make necessary adjustments to their environment as needed. We did not need plumbers, electricians, or other professionals. 

In neolithic times a city was a radical departure from the norm. The early hunter-gathers lived in a relative paradise. Game was plentiful, food of all kinds could be picked from trees and bushes. Realistically I doubt anyone worked more than a few hours per day. So making beer, IMHO, was a wonderful accident. Someone left some grain in a pot, it rained and fermented. They tasted it, went wow and tried to make more. Those early beers must have had a layer of mash on the top that had to be filtered. I wonder who the bright boy was that invented straws?

I don't discount the expertise needed. But it is a modern conceit that we have been progressing until we have reached the all-knowinging crest of the hill inhabited by The Golden Children. These Children really do believe that anything old is inferior.

The remarkable thing is that there is zero evidence that humans have evolved from primitive to modern. No missing link. No intermediate species. Therefore there is every reason to believe that in some obscure village tens of thousands of years ago there was an Isaac Newton or Edison who invented or imagined wondrous things. It's worth noting that many of these types (such as Newton) invented major mathematical structures or ideas more or less from thin air. The story of man isn't necessarily one of steady progression. There are lots of leaps and bounds.

And no doubt mankind has forgotten most of what it ever knew. Until writing, and particularly the printing press, came along, it was difficult for ideas to propagate. And especially for knowledge to accumulate. And without sufficient leisure time (which itself is based on complex social, commercial, and political ideas), even if an ancient had a Eureka moment, would he have the time to develop it or would most of his time be taken up by basic everyday survival tasks?

I think it not only possible but likely that enormously clever inventions and ideas were created by mankind tens of thousands of years ago. But there was likely no way to preserve them by spreading these ideas. Nor the stability and leisure time to cultivate them.

The modern conceit that all ancients were primitive means we likely wouldn't recognize something advanced even if we saw it. Nor do we, as moderns (except for the few of us) notice the truly primitive ideas overtaking our culture by people who think they are the pinnacle of civilized behavior. Abortion, drugs, tattoos, propaganda, gender wacko-ism, etc. As mankind's technology continues to progress at an amazing rate, man himself – at least in the rank and file – is devolving.

We have the greatest, and cheapest trinkets...but people are walking around outside with a mask on. We are this amazing (and alarming) mix of high technology and low culture. Think of Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom. It's a book that everyone should read. Look at what we are normalizing. Look at how degressive the Progressives are making us.

I can tell you, I don't, as a rule, look back at ancient history and sneer and feel superior.