Via Jeremy comes a good example of the issue discussed in the previous post: Bread first or beer first? A bad question

Over the years, though, I’ve come to think it’s actually the wrong way to go about the early history of cereals. It’s a barrier to asking the kinds of questions that will yield interesting answers.

It was one of the cliches of the history of technology, a field I labored in for many years, that asking for the first invention, the first appearance of something was asking the wrong question. . .

But why are we restricting the discussion to beers and breads? If people are going to all the trouble of tackling seeds aren’t they going to try everything they can? Gruels, porridges thick enough to scoop up with the fingers, pottages with other stuff mixed in, toasted grains, toasted powdered grains, sprouted grains (more posts coming on these).

Humans by about 20,000 years ago when they get going on grains were smart experimenters. They had been surveying the earth’s edible resources for thousands and thousands of years.

They had a huge range of techniques at their fingertips–all kinds of hearth cookery; pit cookery; probably treating with mud, water, weak acids, and strong alkalis; probably various kinds of rotting and molds. They knew about pounding for sure. They had been grinding rocks for pigments (and grains are hard like rocks). They had super sharp stone knives and a wide variety of containers. They came to the grains with lots of technical baggage.

So I assume people are going to boil grains, toast grains, pound grains, grind grains, sprout grains, rot grains, dunk grains in acids and alkalis to see what they can do to get fuel. . .

So instead of asking bread or beer, I’d rather ask–what can you do to grains with grindstones, mortars, acids, molds, rots, alkalis, and so on.

Sputniks, internets and the suite of technologies that are emerging now are all just the things humans can do to the stuff we have with the techniques we have. Again and again we get beer, discovered in separate places, once the infrastructure exists, and not before.