The Long Way Back to Ourselves

4.10

Intoxication, Ritual, and the Chemistry of Culture

This episode opens with the oldest chemical evidence of a fermented drink, a nine-thousand-year-old residue of rice, honey, and fruit at Jiahu, China, raising whether grain farming began for bread or beer, a question botanist Jonathan Sauer posed in 1953. It tests Edward Slingerland's thesis that intoxication is a costly, hard-to-fake trust signal among strangers, weighed against dependency's costs and that sanctioned drinking was reserved mostly for men, often of one class. The episode corrects the claim that people drank beer because water was undrinkable: you learn beer was food and wages instead, and coffee and tea later replaced it as the factory shift's drink. It reports David Nutt's ranking of drug harms, placing alcohol above substances carrying prison sentences.