As the brilliant Anne Roe noted in the obituary she wrote about him for The Economist, the archeologist Patrick McGovern who died on August 24th, aged 89, “began to realise that human progress was tightly tied to alcohol” when he tested the residues in ancient pots. McGovern who sported an Indiana Jones hat and a beard of which a Greek philosopher might have been proud, is best known in the wine world for his work on 8,000 year old qvevri amphora in Georgia.
He was, however, not fixated on fermented grape juice; his interest was in all kinds of alcohol enjoyed by our distant ancestors, including the ones neolithic man, like modern South Americans, produced by chewing grains to convert their starch into sugar.
No beer, no Pyramids?
McGovern was fascinated by the four or five litres of beer the builders of the Pyramids were given every day. The ale, he thought, might have been even more vital to them than the bread produced using the same yeasts. “You needed bread to exist; you needed alcohol to enjoy existing… Exploration, experiment, even the basic wish to socialise and produce offspring, were spurred by drinking something fermented.”
