Deep History: The Birth of Alcohol
How old is alcohol? The Earth is 4.2 billion years old, strung together by a mesh of spinning rocks, water, gases, and organic compounds that all carried the ingredients necessary for alcohol, but one small step needed to happen first: life needed to be born. Not human life, necessarily, but life capable of creating chemical processes that could release energy stored in the compounds around it.
Fermentation, as studied by Louis Pasteur, is a process by which energy is created in the absence of respiration. It is believed that early life, during the precambrian period on Earth, may have relied primarily on fermentation for its energy. Organisms which partake in fermentation convert carbohydrates (produced or found in most forms of life today) into alcohol or acid in an anaerobic environment—an environment where respiration is not possible—and energy is released. Ever felt sore after a workout? That's because this happens in your muscles when oxygen is in short supply, but you produce lactic acid, not alcohol. |
Humans and Fermentation
Some research claims evidence of humans harnessing fermentation as many as ten thousand years ago. As fermentation occurs naturally, the process was likely discovered on accident, and either sold, shared, and/or individually discovered by many civilizations. In China, archeological digs have found evidence of fermentation drums dating as old at 8000 B.C.E. Though humans may have had a vague understanding of how to produce ethyl alcohol for many thousands of years longer than the immediate evidence suggest, the oldest records only date back to the times of the Romans, Greeks, and early Jews, who all left behind written accounts describing the production process and effects of alcohol.
Though the process of fermentation was discovered and used by humans long before the common era, it was not thoroughly studied until the fifteen hundreds, after the invention of the microscope, when the organisms responsible for the process could be directly observed. The process was not chemically understood until the 1800's. Today, many fruits, vegetables, grains, and even some meats, are fermented with yeast, which produce alcohol. Though the recipes change, only the flavor is effected. The active ingredient, alcohol, is the same in every alcoholic beverage, and its effects on the body are uniform. Sources: [1],[2],[8] |