A cross-cultural study reveals how the consumption of wine and beer facilitated the evolution of human societies
Alcohol has played an important social, political, and religious role in many societies, including ancient Mesopotamia, where people drank beer together from large vessels using long straws
© Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
To the point:
- Drunk hypothesis. Scholars have long suggested that alcohol played a significant role in promoting large-scale cooperation and the development of complex hierarchical societies.
- Cross-cultural test. An analysis of 186 non-industrial societies found a positive relationship between the presence of traditional fermented beverages (such as mead, wine and beer) and higher levels of political complexity.
- One of many factors. The effect of alcohol was, however, rather small, suggesting that other factors, such as agriculture, were more important for the rise of complex societies.
People have been getting drunk for millennia. Historical records show that alcohol was an integral part of many early civilizations, from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to ancient Greece, China, and the Mayan and Inca empires. In ancient Sumer, for example, beer played an important religious, economic, and political role. It was presented as an offering to the gods to ensure prosperity, used as payment for labourers on large-scale construction projects, and distributed by elites through feasts and celebrations to foster social cohesion and reinforce hierarchical structures. The famous Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh even tells a story in which the animalistic Enkidu is given beer in order to become a truly civilized human being.
Based on this and other evidence, some scholars have proposed that alcohol may have been one of the main factors in the emergence of large-scale, stratified societies. This drunk hypothesis, nicknamed after the book "Drunk: How we sipped, danced and stumbled our way to civilization" by one of its leading proponents, Edward Slingerland, argues that our desire for intoxication is not an evolutionary mistake, but has historically provided cultural benefits that outweighed the harmful health and social consequences.
Cross-cultural analysis
In a new study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig tested these claims using cross-cultural analysis. "The drunk hypothesis is really intriguing, but so far it has not been quantitatively tested across cultures" , says Václav Hrnčíř, a postdoctoral researcher who initiated and conducted the study. "This is because archaeological evidence of alcohol is very fragmentary, and written sources come only from already complex and hierarchical societies."
For this reason, the research team employed state-of-the-art methods of comparative ethnology and causal inference. They collected data on the consumption of traditional fermented beverages from a global sample of 186 ethnographically documented societies with different levels of political complexity. "To understand the association between alcohol and cultural complexity, we used statistical models that take different possible explanations of what happened into account. These causal methods essentially helped us separate the role of alcohol from other key factors that might influence political structures, like agricultural intensity and environmental productivity", says Angela Chira, co-author of the study. The researchers obtained these additional variables from the global Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment (D-PLACE), which is curated at their Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution.
Alcohol as one of many factors
The study found a positive relationship between the presence of fermented beverages and higher levels of political complexity. However, the effect was only modest after controlling for possible confounders, especially agriculture. Although the study did not examine specific mechanisms, the pattern in the cross-cultural data shows that alcohol may have interacted with political complexity as described in the drunk hypothesis. For example, political elites could use alcohol as a tool to mobilise labour, build alliances, and gain and strengthen power and authority. "On the other hand, a relatively weak signal suggests that getting drunk was probably not the main driver behind the rise of complex societies", says Hrnčíř.
Finally, the authors note that the study focused on the role of low-alcoholic beverages in non-industrial settings. In today's world, where alcohol is available in unlimited quantities, including high-alcohol distilled beverages, and drinking has become more solitary and isolated, the dangers of alcohol consumption may, in some cases, outweigh its potential social benefits.
