There's nothing new about the "beer theory of civilization", although this article doesn't really explain it very well. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of i

There's nothing new about the "beer theory of civilization", although this article doesn't really explain it very well. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of it is that it explains how we domesticated crops in the first place. Consider the wild antecedent of maize(corn): teosinte. It's basically grass. It's "cobs", if they can truly even be called that, are tiny. You simply couldn't settle down and try to grow this stuff and be able to actually feed yourself. The yield of edible material is just too tiny. You'd spend more calories growing the stuff than you'd get back out of it. It took thousands of years of selective breeding to yield a crop that would make agriculture viable, so how the hell did we do that when there were no farmers? Beer. While it's not practical to settle in one spot and try to grow teosinte for food, it is possible to gather up enough wild teosinte to make a small amount of chicha (a fermented drink similar to beer). Tedious and painful, but possible. Hunter-gatherers who developed a taste for chicha likely learned they could save time by saving some of the seeds they gathered and scattering them in areas where they'd grow well. Return to the same spot in a year and the next batch of chicha will be easier to make! Selective breeding was a next step. The important notion here is that, because they were making chicha, these hunter-gatherers had motivation to save themselves time and effort without actually having to rely on a crop that was not able to feed them enough calories to pay back the effort expended on it. Thus, humans didn't have to magically peer thousands of years into the future and start domesticating crops so that agriculture would one day become possible. They just had to like beer and be lazy.