After last week's delicious look at bread-like substances from the ancient past, Amber and Anna take you on a pub crawl through human history. This month's Deep Cut explores the earliest fermented beverages found in the archaeological record, contemporary attempts (and successes!) in recreating ancient beer recipes, and we ask the possibly unnecessary question of Did Man Once Live On Beer Alone?  Cheers!

To learn more about this week's topic, check out: 

Braidwood, Robert J., et al. "Symposium: did man once live by beer alone?." American Anthropologist 55.4 (1953): 515-526.

Damerow, Peter. "Sumerian beer: the origins of brewing technology in ancient Mesopotamia." Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 2 (2012): 1-20.

Frank, Alex. "Drinking Through a Straw Could Get You Drunk Faster." Spoon University. 

Holloway, April. "Sip Like a Sumerian: Ancient Beer Recipe Recreated from Millennia-Old Cuneiform Tablets." Ancient Origins.

Fermented beverages of pre- and proto-historic China

Patrick E. McGovern, Juzhong Zhang, Jigen Tang, Zhiqing Zhang, Gretchen R. Hall, Robert A. Moreau, Alberto Nuñez, Eric D. Butrym, Michael P. Richards, Chen-shan Wang, Guangsheng Cheng, Zhijun Zhao, Changsui Wang

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Dec 21; 101(51): 17593–17598. Published online 2004 Dec 8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0407921102

McGovern, Patrick. "Barley Beer: Brewing Up A Civilization in the Near East" https://www.penn.museum/sites/biomoleculararchaeology/?page_id=84 

Tucker, Abigail. "The Beer Archaeologist." Smithsonian.com

Excavations and research at Tel Bazi at LMU-Munich (in German and English)

And even more!

Egyptian alchemist's recipe brings ancient beer to life in Winnipeg 

These people recreated an ancient Roman beer, and here’s what they learned 

Stanford students recreate 5,000-year-old Chinese beer recipe