Hello all --
My ISP was down so I wasn't able to join in at the start of this thread. Interesting discussion! It makes sense to look to Africa as the beginning place for the makings of fermented beverages.
I've posted on this before so this is sort of a recap, but I remain skeptical that mead was the first of all fermented beverages. I'm equally skeptical of wine, or beer. That might sound like I'm in disagreement with the main points but hear me out. I'm actually butressing them.
Something that is important in historical studies of any kind is to avoid the pitfall of what has been called "the etymological fallacy." It's the natural tendency to use modern day concepts and categories to interpret ancient records and artifacts.
This would apply to wine, beer and mead. With the impact of the importance of the scientific method and historical consciousness as part of the modern Western civilization mindset, we tend to apply these three categories fairly strictly. When we look for instances of meadmaking in ancient cultures, we tend to look for what we would today call a mead. It's not necessarily so!
I want to suggest a different approach to this question, and it's something I've been posting on over the years -- rather than look for mead as the first fermented beverage, look for the use of honey. This would amount to a paradigm shift, in the sense which Thomas S. Kuhn meant it.
Take a look here:
http://www.iconocast.com/B000000000000075/Z5/News1_1.jpg
Is this a picture of two faces, or a wine goblet? This is the kind of shift I'm talking about in changing from looking for mead as the first of fermented beverages, to the use of honey in the very earliest makings of fermented beverages.
The Jiahu beverage is a good example. It was made from rice, hawthorne or grape, and honey. What is it? It's neither wine, beer nor mead. It's a fermented beverage created by an ancient Neolithic culture, and unique to that culture. If we could have a conversation with these ancient people, they would be puzzled if we called it a mead. They would be even more puzzled with Asians who may want to argue that this the earliest example of rice wine.
Ancient peoples made fermented beverages from whatever source was at hand, and they weren't interested in modern categories. They didn't set out to make a wine, beer or mead, they made a beverage from available materials. The Jiahu beverage, again, is a good example of this.
So, to recap, neither wine, nor beer, nor mead was "the first." Honey is a ubiquitous food stuff, and certainly would have been used at the very beginning of the makings of fermented beverages. In that sense, as meadmakers, we can count ourselves as members of this most ancient of crafts, the making of fermented beverages using honey, going back to times before written history and even the most ancient of hunter gather cultures. In other words, we as meadmakers are a smaller group of an even wider culture which has roots in the most ancient beginnings of mankind.
Shifting back to Africa -- I've had some very interesting conversations with Garth Cambray in the past on this subject. Garth runs a meadery in South Africa, producing meads based on the meadmaking methods of the San people, among the most ancient of peoples in Africa. He pointed out to me the commonality of words based on mead and meadmaking in so many of the African languages, indicating the antiquity of mead making in ancient Africa.
http://www.iqhilika.co.za/
Studies of the San people and their culture, including their rock paintings, can give important clues to the antiquity of the use of honey in ancient fermented beverages. These people would have been among the earliest makers of honey based beverages, and, looking at their meadmaking practices today, even a beverage that we would today call a mead.
Of course, it's always difficult to prove this with certainty. The scientific method, and validity of scientific theory, depends on whether or not an idea or theortical hypothesis can be falsified. No matter how far back in ancient history we go, there will always be the possibility that an artifact showing an early instance of meadmaking can be falsified by the finding of an even older artifact showing something else.
It might be helpful here to point out that there are actually two approaches to "truth" in science. In the broadest sense, these are whether or not the theory predicts, or whether the theory interprets. The former category, prediction value, has become overarching in the understanding of what science is all about, to the point of excluding theories that best interpret the facts. The latter category applies best, with some modifications, to the historical sciences, or even the human sciences.
So, that's another point -- we should be careful of predictive approaches to historical questions like these, remembering that predictive theories can be falsified by the next archaeological finding. There is the broader picture of interpretative theories. pulling together inferences from a broad spectrum of evidence. I think that the latter approach can help add a more solid foundation to speculations on the beginnings of the makings of fermented beverages.
I'm also careful with the use of "firsts" -- too much of a focus on "firsts" has the danger of bringing the inquiry to something like an Adam and Eve scenario, or falling into the language of mythology.
Honey? It's always been there, and would have quickly been used as a food stuff in the earliest hunting and gathering societies. But so have the other fermentables, including stored materials. The first use of alcoholic fermentation may not have even been a beverage, for all we know, and it likely wasn't the discovery of a single individual, or small group of individuals. For ancient mankind, a very keen observer of nature, the discovery of alcoholic fermentation would have been as easy as falling off a log. Lots of people probably discovered it, even in the earliest of prehistoric times.
Hope this wasn't too long, or too controversial. I'm with Ken 100% on this, but also want to keep the inquiry as broad and as objective as possible.
;D
