A Brief History Lesson on Alcohol with Author Edward Slingerland

the jurogan experience i feel like we should have a drink i think we'd be remiss we have to take it professionally with a drinking podcast that's good we're doing a podcast about drinking yes that makes sense we should have at least a small historically there's been a safety feature built into the

alcohol

so most of us have been drinking thanks regards yeah let's try this ah wow yeah that's good I'll start on Monday morning I'll start on Monday there's a way to start. on a Monday morning, yeah, um, so this is new, so having

alcohol

this strong is something we've only had for a couple hundred years, actually, yeah, so a lot of people don't realize that , so for most of our

history

we've been drinking between two and three percent beers, cool, three percent, yeah, that's historically what beers and grape wines typically contain.

You could get eight to ten, but there's a built-in limit to natural fermentation, so the yeast turns into sugars and alcohol, which is a poison, so the yeast is slowly being poisoned, basically, and we've bred these super resistant yeasts, so nowadays you can get a 16 abv Australian syrah, which is historically unprecedented, but it's crazy that it's as high as possible. get because then the alcohol quenches the yeast, but one way around that is distillation, so you heat, you take that wine, you heat it, ethanol is very volatile, so it comes off first and if you can figure out how to capture that vapor and convert it .

Again in a liquid, you have this, you have really concentrated alcohol. Do they do that with wine? They do it with wine or they take something that ferments naturally, so a weak beer or wine and then they distill it and. What do they call that when they get it on the other end? Distilled liquor, that's what liquor is. Oh, okay, so it's just a type of liquor, yeah, so liquor, liqueur, or liqueur refers to something that has been distilled, so basically the alcohol is extracted. the mix and we turn it into a pure form and once you do that you have like 90, you can get like some vodkas might be like 90-something percent abv, so that's incredibly strong, we're just not equipped for that, so what we're talking about you know this needs to be modulated, it was always historically modulated by the fact that we drank beers that weren't very strong, so there's only going to be a volume limit as to how much you can consume, there's also modulated by social networks. things, so historically we drink in a communal situation where there are very clear ritual restrictions on drinking, so you only drink when someone makes a toast, you're modulating your drinking with other people and you even know that you think about even in a pub Not only do you drink as much as you want, you order the rounds correctly and if you drink the beer too quickly you have to wait until everyone else is ready to order another round, so we socially regulate our drinking and then that's it. regulated by its inherent weakness, if you want to look at it that way, but all of a sudden you get this kind of stuff, you get very strong liquor and you can have that in your house, that's when alcohol becomes really dangerous and it's only been in the last few years. hundreds of years, yeah, distilled spirits weren't because Aristotle's really simple concept described distillation, but technologically it's very difficult to do because you have to be able to, you have to have metallic energy, you need to be able to heat liquids and keep them at a certain temperature are pressurized, it's actually a little dangerous, so in prohibition, when people created stills at home, it was like the early 20th century version of meth labs, you know, they were constantly exploding and people were like you will burn yourself with hot liquid because it's really it's dangerous so it's hard to do it so we just mastered it.

I mean, I'm telling an evolutionary story, so my story starts 10 million years ago with primate ancestors who adapted to alcohol and so on 10 million years ago, about 20,000 years ago. 13,000 years ago we started making alcohol in earnest, not just relying on fruits that were out there that contained some alcohol, and then distillation probably happens around 1300 AD in China and 15 AD in Europe, so it seems like it was a long time ago, but in reality evolutionarily it is yesterday. We just haven't really had time culturally or genetically to adapt to access to this type of alcohol and a long time ago, when people drank beer and, uh, drank wine in particular, they really liked what they did if they had it they carried it with them, They carried beer or wine when they went on trips because it didn't spoil like water would, um, beer, beer without hops spoils pretty quickly, it's like a couple of days, a couple of days, yeah, there is a the theory that beer might have been useful in some cultures because pure fermented water purifies water so if you have bad water from a pond or something and then you ferment it make beer with it yeah drink it so that's one of the stories.

I mean, the purpose of my book is to try to explain the riddle of why we do this, why we put poisons in our bodies, why we like to drink and it's mysterious because it's very expensive, it's physiologically harmful, it has all these social problems. potentials and yet we have been doing it forever, we have been making and drinking alcohol almost as long as we have been doing anything in an organized way, in fact it seems likely that we were doing this before. agriculture and that it is possible that the desire to make beer and wine is what motivated agriculture, so hunter-gatherers made beer before they had agriculture, really yes, so they are making clay pots and yes, there are, you know, They're mashing the stuff, they're malting it to increase the sugar content, I think that's the effect of that and then they ferment it, so we have these sites like and what's the current turkey, the site called goblet tepe is this really. cool ritual site, these are huge stones, have you seen photos of them?

Yeah, I'm very familiar with them thanks to Graham Hancock, who's been on my podcast a few times, he's obsessed with ancient civilizations and that's kind of the rosetta stone of ancient civilizations. because it's at least 12,000 years old and the thought process was that at that time no one could build the kind of structures that those people built, so when they did it, it kind of gave credence to some of their theories that civilization has gone through multiple ascension periods and then resets usually through catastrophic disasters like asteroid impacts, so his theory, um, it's not just his theories, the younger drier impact theory, okay, and the Younger theory of dry ice impact, points to the end of the ice age which coincides with actual evidence of impacts on land in the sense that they take soil samples and when they go down to the same amount of time where the ice age ended They find with this something called um, it's called nuclear glass or Tritonite and these things occur at explosion sites where nuclear weapons are tested, but they also occur at asteroid impact sites, okay, and they find it everywhere around 12 000 south 12,000 years ago, so this theory is that at the end of the ice age, what happened was we passed through an area of ​​our solar system that is rich in comets, okay, and then we got hit and that literally restarted civilization, killed a lot of people, and stopped civilizations. their footprints and then there is a period of reconstruction, so Blackie Tepe tells his reconstruction that no, they don't know well, it's all speculation because Gobekli Tepe was surely covered on purpose, yes, about 12,000 years ago, but that It doesn't indicate how.

A long time ago, before that, it was built properly, but what they do know is that it was done with quite sophisticated methods because many of the carvings were three-dimensional rather than carved into the stone, the stone around it was carved just right to come out and There are also animals in it that aren't even supposed to be from that part of the world. Well, they find out pretty quickly. Yes, there is something very interesting about it and it is huge. You know, they've only discovered it, I think like 10. So far, it's a cool sight, so the role it plays in my story is that they're hunter gatherers, the people who built this place used to think that, but they're not necessarily sure. that this is the place.

The theory that Graham Hancock proposes is okay, he believes that civilization was like they had complete agriculture and this is completely theoretical, it's okay because and it's very disputed, okay, because you're dealing with, you know, it's like a long time. 12,000 years ago, it's hard to know what evidence there is, it was always the evidence against something like gobekli tepe, where is the evidence of sophisticated structures 12,000 years ago and they finally found gobekli tepe, so now they're okay, well now we have evidence of sophistication. structures twelve thousand years ago that should have been built according to our timeline by hunter-gatherers, but they're resisting that and they're thinking that this more recent drier impact theory may indicate that something happened that you know if you look at Egypt, there is clearly more than one era of building styles, there is an old kingdom style and a new can, many of the old things are like deep in the sand when they find them and it is their position that many of This is thousands years older than the pyramids, okay, so my understanding of the site is that there are 100, there were 100 gatherers, uh, there are no grain storage places, they were clearly gathering, they came from all over and they were gathering at this site . to build, so they were working to, you know, erect these pillars and stuff and they were having feasts, so they have all these remains of feasts and they have these big jars that almost certainly contained beer and possibly beer with hallucinogens. from the beginning, so these hunter-gatherers weren't growing hops or whatever they made beer with, they were just finding it wild, they were making it from wild grains, but the argument is that the standard story about alcohol is that we we invented farming and then some time later we noticed someone leaves their sourdough too long and it starts to turn into beer and they say "oh this really tastes good" that's the standard story so we had farming and then we got to the alcohol.

Around the 1950s, some archaeologists began to argue that sites like this and other sites around the world suggest that hunter-gatherers gathered and brewed alcohol before agriculture, so this is the beer before beer hypothesis. bread. It's crazy that what motivated people to sit down and start focusing on making these grains more productive. They wanted to get high, not because they wanted to make bread, and you see the same pattern in other parts of the world, so in South America they make this, uh, beer-like thing. chicha substance now they make it from corn but they used to make it from ancient times the wild ancestor of corn is called teosinte and the interesting thing is that teosinte sucks at making grain as if your goal was to make tortillas I wouldn't even notice this plant because the grains are not very good stuff to eat, but it makes great beer, it's really good for making chicha, so this plant, if these primitive people were looking for something to make food with, they would overlook it. plant, but if they were looking for something to make beer, they would focus on it, grow it and start producing bigger kernels and that's how they would get corn, that's what they did, we know what the original thing was that they got. with was okay, we have something like, you know, the first one, the atom, yeah, I mean, we're certainly getting a little drunk on naturally fermenting fruit, so now you know, the fruit falls to the ground and starts to rot, what is it that rots? is that some of it is being converted to alcohol by yeast and it is so clear that it is easy to discover alcohol because it occurs naturally in our environment all the time.

The earliest evidence of deliberately produced alcohol dates back to around 13,000 years ago, so a bit before we go back. late tepe and this is in modern Israel, they have traces of beer production, so people are clearly fermenting beer. Watch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. View the catalog of jre videos on Spotify, including clips. Easily switch between video and audio. experience on spotify you can listen to jre in the background while using other apps and you can download episodes to save on data costs, all free spotify is absolutely free, you don't need to have a premium account to watch new episodes of jre, you just need to search for jre in your Spotify app, head to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.