Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer

“We’ll soon stage an attack on technology worthy of being chronicled in an anthem by Rush!” – Futurama

In honor of Göbekli Tepe, I decided to take a morning run, but autocorrect changed it to “morning rum,” so, change of plans, guys!

Göbekli Tepe is an archeological site that dates back almost to 10,000 B.C. (12,000 years ago in metric).  12,000 years is a long time, in fact it is older than both agriculture and cities, but younger than my mother-in-law.  But the other thing that it’s not older than . . . is beer.  At Göbekli Tepe they found brewing vessels.  And these weren’t small vessels, they were huge vats up to 160 liters in size, complete with chemical residue from brewing beer.  If they can find chemical evidence of beer 12,000 years later, there’s no wonder mom could smell it even after I’d chewed a pack of minty gum.

This is how I like to imagine they figured out that beer was brewed at Göbekli Tepe.

Beer is older than farms.  Beer is older than agriculture.  The logical question is this:  did people start cities and agriculture . . . just so they had beer on a regular basis?  Is the reason that we have cities right now . . . the liquor store?

It looks like that’s the case.  Nomadic man might not have had Netflix® or Ruffles©, but those weren’t necessary.  Most studies show that when man was nomadic, the rates of leisure were higher than they are today.  The things they did for food (hunting, fishing, and gathering) are enough fun that we do those as hobbies today.  But what was missing?

Beer.  Without a steady stream of beer there wasn’t any way they could say, “Hold my beer and watch this.”  Why is this important?  It’s important because everyone knows that no really good story starts with the words, “So, I was having a salad . . .”

The technology of beer brewing changed mankind.  And I’ll assure you, living in the very first cities that we know of would be nothing like living in a city today – no Uber.  These first cities were founded around 7,500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, and had really cool names like Eridu, Uruk, and Ur that remind me of Swedish death metal band names.

I think that someone triggered him by giving him a hug.

But the first residents of Ur weren’t like you or I.  Exactly how they were different is probably difficult to even guess, but we’ve had nearly 500 generations between them and today’s humans.  And that’s changed us significantly – back in the timeframe that Ur was being formed, most men didn’t reproduce, but most women did.  When civilization was getting started around 6,000 B.C., only one guy in 17 reproduced.  Yes.  The average baby-daddy in Uruk in 6,000 B.C. was impregnating 17 females.  So, your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma was a tramp, all because people made cities to get beer.

What is not shown very well is that the woman’s side scale was nearly three times the scale on the men’s side.  This is graphical evidence that your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma was a tramp.  Oops.  Mine, too.  Grandma, how could you?

In the United States today, about 3/4 of men father children while 85% of women reproduce.  This is significantly better than the average I’ve seen that shows throughout history 80% of women had children while only 40% of men fathered children.  Technology, in this case agriculture and beer, has changed humanity.  Beer goggles appear to work both ways in the modern United States.

Regardless, change from nomadic human to agricultural/urban human has taken us thousands of years to adapt to, and, honestly, I’m still not sold on the cities.  But I’ll keep the beer, thank you.

Other changes that were made possible by the move from nomadic human to urban human include the first:

• Requirement for Money,
• Economic Viability of Slavery,
• Permanent Government,
• Debt,
• Taxes, and
• Bar Tabs.

We don’t remember the things that were problems before agriculture, probably because we were having such a good time not living in cities that we didn’t bother to develop a written language to gripe about our problems.  What’s to gripe about?  I have to go hunting again?  I don’t have a job because there aren’t any jobs so I get to go fishing?  Bummer.

Over time, in the thousands of years since the development of agriculture, coping mechanisms evolved that created stability in the “new” urban-agricultural society.  Pretty significant adaptations included:

• Organized Religion,
• Creation of Classes,
• Division of Labor,
• Eating Tide© Pods, and
• Laws.

Shhh.  Don’t warn the kids.  Let evolution run its course. 

These adaptations allowed post-agricultural civilization to become stable, or at least stable enough so that empires could form.  But as people changed their environment, their environment changed them.  It takes seven generations (at minimum) to create a new dog breed.

How long until a new type of human is bred by the new conditions in the city?  If I were to guess, given that humans are much more complicated that it would take 20 or more generations.  Rather than going off to hunt they’d have to do the same job, day after day, for years at a time.  Rather than start a fight with a machete because they were mad about friends who put mayonnaise and strawberry jelly in their hard hat, they’d laugh.  That alone probably took about five hundred years.

Some people didn’t make the transition.  The result, if you’re a guy?  You don’t breed.

Monogamy became more firmly embedded in society only in the West, and was primarily spread by Western society, being a recent (within the last 200 years) in most places that aren’t Western.  This had an amazingly stabilizing effect on society as a whole – fathers have more of a stake in the future of society.  Sure, kings and powerful guys had mistresses, but for the most part more men (on a percentage basis) got to have children than ever in history.

DEFCON 1:  This would be The Mrs.’ reaction to me having a mistress.

Thousands of years of evolution of both society and of the humans that make up society led us to a fairly stable way of doing things.  Monogamy, sex roles, class, and hierarchy allowed life to proceed smoothly, and wealth to be created in society.  I’m not saying that it was better than hunting and fishing all day, but there was certainly more beer.  And after electricity, cold beer.  The 1950’s was probably the height (in the United States) of this society in many respects.

• Women didn’t work as much – they didn’t have to.
• Divorce rates were low – mom and dad stayed together.
• Illegal drug use was low – yes, people drank. That was the point of society, right?
• Church attendance was high.
• Biggest problem of 1950’s schools? Gum chewing.

The last sixty years, however, has led to the greatest amount of technological and social change in any sixty years in the history of humanity.  What changes?

• Birth Control – The Pill was introduced in 1960 – graph below. You’d have thought this would have led to lower births out of wedlock, but, not really.  I don’t really understand this, since very few babies are married when born, outside of Pakistan.

I was born out of wedlock.  Not married at all.  Oh, and neither was my mom.  Sometimes the trend is your friend.

• Significant Immigration from Non-Western Cultures – massive influxes of people in societies happens in history, but every time that it happens, it later gets called “an invasion.”

I’m still looking for examples of successful multi-cultural civilizations.  I even went onto a communist website to search for them.  Still came up empty, though I do realize now that real communism has not been tried yet.  Whew!  I was worried that the unending stream of failures meant that it would fail here, too.

• Massive Welfare – In 1965 President Johnson proclaimed the Great Society – we’d make everyone rich. Despite hundreds of billions in welfare spending, the only thing the Great Society created was roughly the same amount of poor people, but poor people who now depend on the government.  Might be correlated with illegitimate births?

Thankfully, we’ve seen no more need of welfare after spending this much and poverty and people protesting for more money has disappeared.  Yay!  I love winning!

• Fragmentation of Communication – in 1983, the highest-rated television program in history (non-sports) in the United States happened. It will never happen again.  Television has fragmented into hundreds of channels, plus dozens of online services, giving millions of options.  But the common culture from communication is gone.
• Decline in Religion – Religious observance has dropped in America, despite religious belief being vitally important during Colonial times, when it is estimated that up to 80% of colonists were regular church goers, compared with 37% today. You may not be a religious, but it’s yet another commonality that we’ve lost.
• The Internet – prior to the Internet, most person to person communication was local. Now?  Left-handed dentists with impaired vision can form their own FaceBorg® group.  The Internet brings us together.  The Internet also allows us to fragment.

The Internet might be the most significant technological change of recent memory.  There was a time when we actually argued about facts rather than hitting Google® to solve an argument.  Now?  Nope.  But the Internet isn’t a tool for unity, it’s a tool for fragmentation.

Start with Futurama™, end with The Simpsons©.  Is there anything beer can’t do?

We’ve been living with technological change for thousands of years and trying to cope with it since we started the first cities.  Who knows where this will all end up?  And to think, it all started with some guy founding the first city 10,000 years ago saying, “Hold my beer, watch this . . . .”

Wedlock, Divorce Graphs, H/T Secular Patriarchy (LINK).

Göbekli Tepe picture via Teomancimit [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

This post was spawned by some comments with James over at Bison Prepper (LINK), but no bison were harmed during the production of this post.