Did our ancestors give up easy sex for beer?

Did Humans Give Up Easy Sex for Easy Beer?

Did our ancestors inadvertently sacrifice a smorgasboard of sexual partners for easier access to beer? That's what Gizmodo's Joel Johnson thinks after reading Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha's Sex at Dawn and Patrick McGovern's Uncorking the Past. In Sex at Dawn, Ryan and Jetha argue that "before humans settled down into civilization, we were small bands of hunter-gatherers who had no notion of sexual monogamy." But after humans began cultivating, "it became important to ensure that you weren't wasting your precious grains on someone else's offspring, especially if it meant you own kid was getting short shrift. Hence monogamy." McGovern, who has done the hard work of studying the history of alcohol, thinks it's possible that humans first began tilling the soil to grow grain for beer, not bread. "I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at first," Johnson says. "Who wouldn't want to get drunk whenever they chose?" But those industrious agriculturalists had no idea that "in just a few generations the idyllic, if unpredictable era of lazy browsing, casual sex, and occasional fruit-fueled orgies would give way to the terrible force of civilization—all so we could bring home a six-pack every night."

Read original story in Gizmodo | Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2010