At RealClearScience Ross Pomeroy points out something that should be obvious but, apparently, isn’t. Human beings did not evolve to consume calories in liquid form:
Humans have existed as a distinct species for roughly 315,000 years, and for all but a fraction of that time, we drank just one liquid after weaning: water. Boring, flat, calorie-free, water – with any flavor and texture coming from sediments, bacteria, or excrement.
Now, faced with a sudden explosion of calorically-dense beverages in the evolutionary blink of an eye, our bodies are outmatched. Put simply, we are not meant to drink our calories, and it shows in elevated rates of obesity around the world.
Humans started drinking the equivalent of very, very light beer 13,000 years ago. And we may have consumed milk from livestock as many as 20,000 years ago. But this isn’t very long on an evolutionary timescale. Our naïveté´ with beverages is apparent in our physiology today.
His observations are fine as far as they go. However, there’s something he does not consider. There are lots of things that human beings did not evolve to do but nonetheless have done for the last 10,000 years or so. One of them is live together in groups larger than a few dozen related people or, indeed, live in close proximity to people to whom we were not related at all.
Then, just a little over 10,000 years ago, a number of things happened more or less all at once. Human beings began domesticating and husbanding livestock, they began to cultivate grains, they began fermenting various things to make beer and wine, and they began adopt a sedentary habit, i.e. to live in towns and cities. And those cities and towns included people who were not closely related to one another.
The only ones of those things it is quite difficult to do while nomadic are brewing beer and making. It has been suggested by some anthropologists that human beings adopted a sedentary habit expressly to allow them to make beer and wine. And the evidence supports them.
I suspect that as we become wiser in identifying when people began consuming cows’, sheeps’ and goats’ milk the time when each of those began will be pushed back in time. The notion that consuming milk has not changed human evolution is far-fetched. My ancestors adapted to consume milk probably considerably more than 10,000 years ago. Have I mentioned that milk is also fermented into alcoholic beverages, e.g. kumiss, blaand, etc.
Consequently, there is some evidence that, indeed, beer did invent civilization.
I doubt anybody started drinking beer for the calories, and what about stipjoints? I doubt men have changed much in 10,000 years.
An explanation for the various Venus of Willendorf carvings?
In dense settlements with poor sanitation beer and wine were safer than water.
It also became a form of payment which enabled the willing labor for large projects.