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The precise point at which wild grains such as barley were domesticated and more systematically exploited for food and alcoholic beverages has long been a contentious issue among archeologists, the Canadian team states in a 50-page study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

While the SFU researchers say they haven’t found a “smoking brew pot” providing absolute proof that a thirst for beer drove the Natufian people to become farmers, they “conclude that feasting and brewing very likely provided a key link between increasing ‘complexity’ and the adoption of cereal cultivation.”

Hayden told Postmedia News that “there are lots of implications” of the team’s findings, and that “brewing was just part of the picture” during humanity’s pivotal shift to settled, stable communities with enough food supplies to foster more complex cultural developments.

But beer-making, he added, was one factor “that we think was important in making feasts such powerful tools for attracting people and getting them committed to producing surpluses.”

A recent New York Times article briefly summarized the Canadian study in the headline: “How beer gave us civilization.”

But the SFU archeologists make clear that imbibers of today’s mass-marketed and craft beers might not recognize their beloved amber suds in those ancestral substances produced by the Natufians.

“Beers made in traditional tribal or village societies generally are quite different from modern industrial beers,” they state in the paper. “Traditional beers often have quite low alcohol contents (2 to 4 per cent) include lactic acid fermentation giving them a tangy and sour taste, contain various additives such as honey or fruits, and vary in viscosity from clear liquids, to soupy mixtures with suspended solids, to pastes.”