How Beer Created Civilization

What led early humans to begin cultivating grain some 10,000 years ago? It was beer — not bread — a growing body of research shows.   Archaeologists have long hinted that Neolithic, or Stone Age, people first began growing and storing grain, like wheat and barley, to turn it into alcohol instead of flour for making bread. The hypothesis was recently revisited by writer Gloria Dawson in the science magazine Nautilus.  A botanist named Jonathan D. Sauer first posed the theory in the early 1...