What Cavemen Actually Drank (It Wasn't Water)

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Picture this. You are thirsty. You walk to the kitchen, grab a drink, done. You did not think about it. You never do.

[00:00:09]13,000 years ago, a caveman was also thirsty. He walked across his cave, grabbed a drink, done. Same routine, same instinct, except his drink was beer. And he brewed it himself. Before farming existed, before bread, before pottery was even good at being pottery, the first beer on Earth was made by cavemen using rocks in a cave. That is not a joke. That is the actual archaeological record. The cave is called Rakafett.

[00:00:43]Raett.

[00:00:45]It sits on the edge of Mount Carmel in northern Israel. In 2018, a team led by Lee Leu from Stanford University walked in there expecting to find boring rocks.

[00:00:57]What they found was a 13,000year-old brewery. The cavemen who lived there were called Natufians.

[00:01:05]Natuians.

[00:01:06]Cool name. Sounds like a folk band. They were not farmers. They were not citybuilders. They were hunter gatherers. And they had figured out how to take wild wheat and barley, smash it into mush in stone bowls, soak it in water, let wild yeast do its thing, and produce a liquid with actual alcohol in it. It was not modern beer. It was thicker, cloudier, closer to a soup with feelings. But it was beer, and they were brewing it 5,000 years before anyone planted a crop on purpose. Now, stay with me here because this is one of the great unsolved mysteries of human history. For 60 years, archaeologists have argued about a question that sounds completely insane.

[00:01:53]Did humans invent farming so they could eat? Or did humans invent farming so they could keep brewing? Think about that. The single most important shift in human history. The moment we stopped chasing food and started growing it. The moment that led to villages, cities, and everything that came after.

[00:02:15]There is a serious academic theory that we did all of that for beer. And Rakett Cave is the strongest evidence yet that the theory might be correct because here we have humans brewing alcohol before they were farming. The beer came first, the fields came after. So already before we have even left the cave, we have established two things. One, cavemen were drinking beer. Two, beer might literally be the reason civilization exists. Barack Fett is not the oldest known alcohol on Earth. That title belongs somewhere else entirely.

[00:02:55]9,000 years ago in a village called Giu.

[00:02:58]Gi Aahu in northern China, somebody was making a drink that defies categorization.

[00:03:06]A molecular archaeologist named Patrick McGovern from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed the residue inside ancient pottery jars from this site.

[00:03:16]What he found was extraordinary.

[00:03:18]The jars contained traces of rice, honey, hawthorne fruit, and grape, all fermented together in one drink. It was not beer. It was not wine. It was not me. It was all three at the same time. A 9,000-year-old fruity rice honey beverage that came in somewhere between 3 and 6% alcohol by volume. So, roughly the strength of a modern logger. Imagine being the caveman who tasted that first.

[00:03:50]He is a stone age villager. Somebody hands him a clay pot. He sips it. His brain has never experienced this combination of flavors before. His face does something it has never done. And then 30 minutes later, he discovers what being tipsy is. Nobody warned him.

[00:04:09]Nobody could warn him. He is the first generation of humans to find out that fruit when left alone long enough can make you feel like a god. Which brings us to the real twist of this whole story. Because here's the part nobody tells you. The reason cavemen love alcohol is not because they invented it.

[00:04:31]They inherited it. This is called the drunken monkey hypothesis.

[00:04:36]Yes, that is the real name. It was proposed by a biologist at UC Berkeley named Robert Dudley.

[00:04:44]The idea is this. Long before there were cavemen, before there were humans, before there was anything you would recognize as us, our primate ancestors were swinging through trees eating fruit. And the most calorie rich fruit, the ripest and sweetest fruit, was the fruit that had started to ferment, which meant it contained alcohol.

[00:05:08]So for millions of years, evolution rewarded the monkeys who could smell alcohol from a distance.

[00:05:15]Because alcohol meant calories, alcohol meant food. The monkeys who liked the smell ate more and survived more. The monkeys who hated the smell missed out.

[00:05:27]In 2022, a team confirmed this. They studied wild spider monkeys in Panama and proved that yes, the monkeys actively seek out fermented fruit. Then in 2025, a follow-up study on wild chimpanzees found something genuinely wild.

[00:05:45]The average chimp in its normal daily diet of ripe fruit consumes the equivalent of one to two human drinks worth of alcohol every single day.

[00:05:58]Wild chimps are slightly buzzed all the time. Always have been. Nobody told them. They cannot read. So when that Nufian caveman picked up his beer 13,000 years ago, he was not inventing a new behavior. He was continuing a behavior his ancestors had been doing for millions of years. He just got a lot better at it. Now, we have to talk about water because the title of this video promised you that cavemen were not drinking it. And that needs honesty.

[00:06:30]They were drinking it. Of course, they were drinking it. They were not foolish.

[00:06:36]But here's the nuance, and it is genuinely interesting.

[00:06:40]Paleolithic cavemen had safer water than humans would have for most of the next 10,000 years.

[00:06:47]They lived in small groups spread out across huge landscapes, drinking from fast flowing streams and groundwater springs.

[00:06:56]The water was usually clean. They knew not to drink from stagnant pools because they could smell that those were bad.

[00:07:03]They were not stupid. They were just paying attention.

[00:07:08]The water problem started later. Once humans built cities and packed thousands of people next to each other and started using the same river for drinking, washing, and bathroom situations, things got grim.

[00:07:21]The dirty water era was not a caveman problem. That was a US problem. We invented dirty water. So when the caveman picked up his beer instead of water, he was not avoiding a thirst quencher. He was picking the more fun option because alcohol for the first time in human history had been turned into something you could brew on purpose, store, share, and use for ceremonies.

[00:07:49]He was not drinking to survive. He was drinking to celebrate. And that raises the question that built our entire weekend culture, our pubs, our parties, our entire social existence as a species.

[00:08:05]Once you have invented beer, what do you do with it? You drink it with other cavemen around a fire as the sun goes down and he is now slightly buzzed and it is dark and there is no television and there are 8 hours of night ahead of him. What did that caveman actually do next? That is a whole separate problem and we are going to talk about it next time. This is stick and stone. The caveman invented the buzz.