An alcoholic beverage made from moldy rice may have provided the spark that led to the widespread adoption of agriculture in East Asia. Having detected remnants of this ancient rice beer on 10,000-year-old pottery vessels in China, researchers believe that the boozy substance was probably consumed during ceremonial feasts and dramatically altered the culture and lifestyle of prehistoric societies across the region.
While the question of when and how rice was first domesticated remains a matter of debate, the Shangshan culture of China’s Lower Yangzi River region is widely considered to have played a significant role. To learn more about this process, the authors of a new study analyzed microfossil remains on pottery sherds from the early phase of the Shangshan archaeological record, which stretches back ten millennia.
When assessing the residues on fermentation and serving vessels – such as globular jars, cups, and bowls – the researchers found high quantities of rice starch, particles of rice husks, and fungi. Based on these results, it appears that the receptacles once held rice-based fermented liquids that were made using a starter compound called jiuqu or qu.
Consisting of molds from the Monascus genus and yeast, qu was used to create beer from rice – as indeed it still is today in parts of Taiwan. Further analysis revealed that the ancient beverage also contained small amounts of other cereals, as well as acorns and lilies.
According to the study authors, the timing of this alcoholic invention lines up well with the start of the Holocene, when warmer temperatures and higher humidity levels would have provided the ideal environment for fungi to flourish, thus enabling the formation of qu. “These conditions may have led to a natural fermentation process, at first unintentionally resulting from moldy leftover rice,” write the researchers.
“When early Shangshan people noticed the results of this natural fermentation and experienced the psychoactive effects of alcohol, they plausibly replicated the process and increased production by using pottery vessels,” they add. Following this innovation, “Shangshan people not only used rice as a staple food but also as a raw material for brewing fermented beverages, marking the earliest known alcohol fermentation technique in East Asia.”
In a statement, first author of the paper Professor Liu Li explained that “these alcoholic beverages likely played a pivotal role in ceremonial feasting, highlighting their ritual importance as a potential driving force behind the intensified utilization and widespread cultivation of rice in Neolithic China.”
In other words, the spread of these drunken get-togethers may have acted as the cue for large-scale rice production, thus marking the beginning of the Neolithic period – when hunter-gatherer lifestyles gave way to settled agriculture – in China.
The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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