Our Hunter-Gatherer Origins
The history of how beer helped create human civilization begins about 12,000 years ago, when some Neolithic (“late stone age”) humans took up agriculture. They ditched the wandering hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and took up animal husbandry, followed soon thereafter by farming. That triggered such a radical change in society and how humans lived that it came to be known as the “Neolithic (or Agricultural) Revolution”. For millions of years, our distant proto-human and human ancestors hunted animals, scavenged their carcasses, or ate wild plants and fruits. Then the hunter gatherer lifestyle followed since our species started its evolution into humans was abandoned. It was replaced by permanent settlements, out of which cities and civilization grew.
Unlike our (mostly) domesticated nourishment sources today, the plants and animals that sustained our ancestors were wild. From the earliest hominids, our ancestors neither controlled nor attempted to influence the planting or birth of their food sources. All things considered, it was a relatively easy lifestyle. For millions of years, human population densities were pretty low compared to the food resources available to feed them. Other than periods of crisis caused by draughts or other natural disasters, our hunter-gatherer ancestors seldom needed to put in more than an hour or two of work each day to secure enough calories to survive, or even thrive. Indeed, anthropologists today calculate that on average, hunter-gatherers such as the Kalahari Desert Bushmen spend only about fifteen hours each week to obtain food.
