Uncorking the Past Read online

  Ape behavior in the artificial environment of a laboratory cage is equally illuminating. According to Ronald Siegel, chimpanzees given unlimited access to alcohol—an “open bar”—will at first guzzle the equivalent of three or four bottles of wine. Males outdrink the smaller females and get intoxicated twice as often. Over time, their consumption falls into a more restrained pattern, but the chimpanzees still imbibe enough to stay permanently drunk. Such behavior has no apparent evolutionary benefit: intoxication seems to be an end in itself. By experimenting with a range of offerings at the bar, the researchers also noted that their chimpanzees generally favored sweet wines over dry and flavored vodka over pure alcohol.

  Rats showed greater restraint than the chimpanzees under comparable experimental conditions. Outfitted with spacious underground quarters and a twenty-four-hour “bar,” their drinking patterns assumed a regularity that many of us would immediately recognize. The colony avidly congregated around the drinking hole just before the main feeding time. The predinner cocktail, perhaps to whet the appetite, was followed several hours later by a nightcap before sleep. Every three to four days, the colony drank more than usual, as if they were partying.

  DRIVEN BY DRINK

  Early hominids and apes had a powerful incentive to overindulge in fermented fruits and other high-sugar resources, such as honey: these foods are only available in season. It might have been possible to store seeds or nuts in a dark, cool cave for a future repast, but tactics had not yet been devised to protect sweet, alcoholic delights from marauders and microorganisms. To tide themselves over the lean seasons, it made sense for our ancestors to eat and drink as much as they could when it could be had.

  Gorging on energy-rich sugar and alcohol was an excellent solution for surviving in an often resource-poor and hostile environment. Extra calories could be converted to fat for future use, then gradually burned off in harsher times. For an early hominid, most of this energy was probably channeled into walking considerable distances in search of ripe fruit, nuts and other foods, hunting game, and evading predators. The hominid body, with its powerful leg muscles and generous gluteus maximus behind to balance forward thrust, can achieve relatively high running speeds of up to 48 kilometers an hour. Any overweight individuals were likely quickly weeded out by lions traveling at more than 120 kilometers an hour.

  Drunkenness places individual organisms at greater risk of attack by a hostile species, as their reflexes and physical prowess are inhibited. Social animals, including birds and monkeys, have a distinct advantage when engaging in a bout of gluttony. As their muscular coordination and mental acuity decrease, their large numbers help ward off any party crasher in the neighborhood. Before lapsing into oblivion, these animals also usually send up a collective alarm or battle en masse against the intruder. A location safe from attack also facilitates binging, whether by default (if, for example, the inebriating substance is found at the top of a tall tree) or by design, if the fermented food and drink are carried to a mountaintop or into a cave before the festivities begin.

  The reasons for alcohol consumption in the animal world are invisible to the observer. Specialists in animal behavior cannot read the “thoughts” of fruit flies or chimpanzees, let alone extinct hominids, to understand what might compel them to eat a batch of fermenting fruit. Although geneticists and neuroscientists have begun to elucidate the molecular mechanisms by which organisms sense, respond to, and metabolize alcohol, any comprehensive explanation of this phenomenon is still a long way off.

  THE PALAEOLITHIC HYPOTHESIS

  How far back in the mists of archaeological time have humans savored alcohol, and how has it shaped us as a biological species and contributed to our cultures? The drunken monkey hypothesis explores the biological side of the question. The Neolithic period, beginning around 8000 B.C. in the Near East and China (chapters 2 and 3), provides a rich trove of archaeological material to mine for answers to the cultural questions. Humans were then settling down into the first permanent settlements, and they left abundant traces of their architecture, jewelry, painted frescoes, and newly invented pottery filled with fermented beverages. For the Palaeolithic period, beginning hundreds of thousands of years earlier, we are on much shakier ground. Yet this is undoubtedly the time when humans first experimented with alcoholic beverages, as they relished their fermented fruit juices and came to apprehend their ecstasies and dangers.

  The evidence from Palaeolithic archaeology is scant, and it is easy to overinterpret and read modern notions into this fragmented past. Archaeologists once thought that early humans were meat eaters on a grand order because their encampments were littered with animal bones. Then it dawned on someone that the remains of any fruits or vegetables simply had not survived, and that the abundance of bones, which were infinitely better preserved, indicated only that meat constituted some portion, possibly minor, of the early human diet.

  Figure 1. © The New Yorker Collection 2005, Leo Cullum from cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

  In Ancient Wine I outlined a plausible scenario, which I refer to as the Palaeolithic hypothesis, explaining how Palaeolithic humans might have discovered how to make grape wine. In brief, this hypothesis posits that at some point in early human prehistory, a creature not so different from ourselves—with an eye for brightly colored fruit, a taste for sugar and alcohol, and a brain attuned to alcohol’s psychotropic effects (see chapter 9)—would have moved beyond the unconscious craving of a slug or a drunken monkey for fermented fruit to the much more conscious, intentional production and consumption of a fermented beverage.

  In an upland climate where the wild Eurasian grape (Vitis vinifera ssp. sylvestris) has thrived for millions of years, such as eastern Turkey or the Caucasus, we might imagine early humans moving through a luxuriant river bottom. Using roughly hollowed-out wooden containers, gourds, or bags made of leather or woven grasses, they gather up the ripe grapes and carry them back to a nearby cave or temporary shelter. Depending on their ripeness, the skins of some grapes at the bottom of the containers are crushed, rupture, and exude their juice. If the grapes are left in their containers, this juice will begin to froth or even violently bubble up. Owing to natural yeast on the skins, it gradually ferments into a low-alcohol wine—a kind of Stone Age Beaujolais Nouveau.

  Eventually, the turbulence subsides, and one of the more daring members of the human clan takes a tentative taste of the concoction. He reports that the final product is noticeably smoother, warmer, and more varied in taste than the starting mass of grapes. The liquid is aromatic and full of flavor. It goes down easily and leaves a lingering sense of tranquility. It frees the mind of the dangers that lurk all around. Feeling happy and carefree, this individual invites the others to partake. Soon everyone’s mood is elevated, leading to animated exchanges. Perhaps some people sing and dance. As the day turns into night and the humans keep imbibing, their behavior gets out of hand. Some members of the clan become belligerent, others engage in wild sex, others simply pass out from intoxication.

  Once having discovered how to make such a beverage, early humans would likely have returned year after year to the wild grapevines, harvesting the fruit at the peak of ripeness and even devising ways to process it—perhaps stomping the grapes with their feet or encouraging better anaerobic fermentation of the juice and pulp by covering the primitive container with a lid. The actual domestication of the Eurasian grapevine, according to the so-called Noah hypothesis (see chapter 3), as well as the development of a reliable method of preventing the wine from turning swiftly to vinegar (acetic acid), was still far in the future. A tree resin with antioxidant effects might have been discovered accidentally early on, but it would only have delayed the inevitable by a few days. The wiser course was to gorge on the delectable beverage before it went bad.

  Similar experiences with alcoholic beverages must have been played out many times, in different places, by our human forebears. Grapes are only one of many fermenting fruits. In sub-Saharan Africa, t
he heartland of modern humanity (Homo sapiens), from where we spread out to populate the rest of the world about one hundred thousand years ago, the first fermented beverage might have been made from figs, baobab fruit, or sweet gourds. Honey, composed of 60 to 80 percent simple sugars (fructose and glucose) by weight, would have been highly sought after as an ingredient. Bees in temperate climates have been churning out honey since at least the Cretaceous period, and many animals, including humans, have risked the stings of angry bees to steal the sweet honey from their hives.

  Map 1 (overleaf). Spread of fermented-beverage experimentation across Eurasia. Fermented beverages were made as early as 100,000 B.P., when humans came “out of Africa” on their way to populating the Earth. Depending upon locally available and introduced domesticated plants, fermented beverages were produced from honey, barley, wheat, grape, date, and many other grains and fruits (e.g., cranberries in northwestern Europe). The earliest beverages were mixed “grogs,” probably with added herbs, tree resins, and other “medicinal” ingredients (e.g., ephedra on the Eurasian steppes).

  Roger Morse, a longtime friend of my family and formerly professor of apiculture at Cornell University, often argued that honey must have been the basis for the world’s earliest alcoholic beverage. Imagine a cavity in a dead tree that bees have filled with wax and honey. One day the tree falls to the ground, and the cavity is exposed to a soaking rain. Once the store of honey is diluted to 30 percent honey and 70 percent water, yeasts specially adapted to survive high sugar contents will start the fermentation and produce mead. Along comes our hominid ancestor, who has been watching this hive for a long time. She goes straight to the cavity, has a taste, and if not a selfish sort, calls in her companions to enjoy the alcohol-laced libation.

  Many such scenarios can be imagined. Although all are inherently plausible, based on what we know about human societies, the biology of the modern human brain, and personal experience, the main problem with the Palaeolithic hypothesis is that it is unprovable. No containers have yet been recovered from the Palaeolithic period, not even one made from stone. Objects made of wood, grass, leather, and gourds have disintegrated and disappeared. The only real prospect for chemically detecting a fermented beverage from this period is to try to extract what might have been absorbed into a crevice of a rock near a Palaeolithic encampment where the beverage might have been prepared.

  Nevertheless, some enticing hints in the archaeological record suggest that the Palaeolithic hypothesis may not be far off the mark. For example, some of the earliest artistic representations of our species depict bare-breasted, large-hipped females, often referred to as Venuses because of their obvious associations with sexuality and childbearing. One particularly provocative Venus (see plate 2) was chiseled into a cliff at Laussel in the Dordogne region of France around twenty thousand years before the present (B.P.), not far from the famous cave of Lascaux, which teems with Palaeolithic frescoes. With one hand on her pregnant belly, the long-haired beauty holds up an object that resembles a drinking horn. Other identifications of this object are possible, including a musical instrument (but then why is the narrow end of the horn pointed away from her mouth?) or a lunar symbol denoting the female (but you could just as easily infer that a bison horn is a sign of complementary maleness or hunting prowess).

  A drinking-horn identification is in keeping with the much later predilection of Celtic princes in this region to show off their drinking prowess with magnificent horns. The setting of this Venus in an open-air rock shelter, overlooking a broad valley, would have been ideal for bringing together a large group to enjoy and celebrate life with an alcoholic beverage, perhaps made from wild berries growing nearby (the famous winegrowing area of Bordeaux is only one hundred kilometers away) or a cache of honey. Further accentuating her sexuality and the fecundity of nature, the figure’s breasts and belly were strikingly painted with red ocher. In later art, fermented beverages—including wine made from grapes and New World chocolate drinks—were often shown in red and symbolized blood, the fluid of life.

  Even if the Laussel Venus is drinking from rather than blowing on her horn, it seems possible that early hominids or humans might have made music while they enjoyed their alcoholic beverage. In a cavern at Geissenklösterle in southern Germany, some fifteen thousand years earlier than Laussel, archaeologists discovered three fragmentary flutes with at least three holes, fashioned from a woolly mammoth’s ivory tusk and the wing bones of whooper swans. The holes were beveled, suggesting that the instruments were played, like a modern flute, by blowing across one of the holes with variable lip pressure or embouchure, rather than blowing directly through one end. A range of tones, perhaps even octaves, could have been achieved by fingering, that is, closing off one or more of the holes while blowing.

  In China around 7000 B.C., Neolithic people made a very similar instrument from a specific bone of the red-crowned crane (see chapter 2). The choice of the crane and swan bones, although separated by thirty thousand years, might have been quite deliberate, as these birds are known for their intricate mating dances, replete with bows, leaps, wing extensions, and ringing musical notes. The cacophony of hoots and calls can last all night, like a drunken fraternity party.

  The high, dramatic flight of these birds over the countryside, especially when large flocks of them moved through during their spring and fall migrations, would also have captured the imagination of early humans. I can remember excavating in Jordan when someone cried out, “Storks!” Their white bodies, accented by black wings, stood out against the blue sky and made us marvel at the world they must inhabit.

  The Geissenklösterle flutes do not stand alone. Ten thousand years later, humans were blowing on nearly an orchestra of flutes or pipes at the cave of Isturitz in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Twenty examples, made from vulture wing bones, have thus far been recovered from what is considered to be the greatest accumulation of art at any site in Ice Age Europe. Four holes had been drilled into each flute, with one pair of holes clearly separated from the other. Because the vulture mating ritual is not very vocal, it might have been the high, languorous, circling flight of a male and female, bonded for life, that impressed early humans.

  ENTERING DREAMLAND

  Soaring bird flight is a long way from the stupendous art in the prehistoric caves of France and northern Spain. Yet if the skies represented a world beyond the reach of early humans, the bowels of the Earth must have been equally mysterious. Using only the light from animal-fat lamps, the Stone Age artists scaled walls and reached into remote crevices to create a wonderland of black- and red-pigmented animals, mostly bison, lions, mammoths, and other large animals of the hunt, so realistically rendered that they seem to leap out of the stone.

  I experienced some of the excitement and awe of this underground world when my wife and I were led by a French guide through the narrow, snaking passageways of Font de Gaume, close to Les Eysies. Stooping down to make our way along, we felt as if we were traveling back in time to the first attempts of humanity to understand the world. As the dim light of our guide’s flashlight picked out incised and painted bison, deer, and wolves in the glowering night of the cave, we came away amazed at the skill of the artists in representing the animals of the lush Dordogne Valley.

  The naturalistic scenes are accompanied by geometric and figurative motifs—dots, hoofprints, hatched circles and squares, chevrons, and swirling circles—in red ocher. In the cave of Cougnac are the remains of a pile of ocher, apparently used to outline hands by stenciling or to transfer the pigment directly by smearing hands with it and pressing them against the wall.

  What was going on in these Ice Age grottoes? They can hardly have been ordinary dwellings, as more convenient, warmer shelters existed closer to the surface. A possible answer can be gleaned from the anthropomorphic faces and figures that occasionally appear in the caves. Heads of humans are shown with horned headdresses or flowing, animal-like manes. Faces appear to erupt into laughter, and erect penises
reach out into the night.

  The most wondrous example of anthropomorphizing art was brought to light inside the cave of Les Trois Frères, in an expansive underground chamber called the Sanctuary, which dates from close to the end of the Ice Age, about 13,000 B.P. The Palaeolithic artist had to wriggle out onto a narrow ledge four meters above the floor of the cave to accomplish this masterpiece. The result was a stunning, strange composite of human and animal, nearly a meter tall. A bearded, owl-like face is surmounted by the multipronged antlers of a stag. With paws like those of a rabbit or feline stretched out in front and a horse’s tail trailing behind, the figure appears to be stamping out some kind of dance, jumping from one foot to the other. While the lower part of the body is distinctly human, even the exposed genitalia, everything else about the figure boggles the mind. Placed at the highest point in the large artistic composition, the creature appears to oversee the profusion of life below, including stampeding wild animals and even a nocturnal owl, and to reassure us that all is well as “it” stares down at us.