The social drinker

Iusually only read National Geographic in the waiting room of a rather wonderful dentist in Kilkenny, who is now sadly retiring.

But this month’s lead story on the 9,000-year history of alcohol was so compelling that I broke with habit and read the magazine, despite not requiring a filling.

Thanks to the rather splendid article, I was reminded that mankind has been drinking alcohol for at least 7,000 years before Christ was born.

We know this because Chinese pottery from this period has been found along with particles of booze attached.

But we have probably been drinking for much longer than this. Experts speculate that our monkey-like ancestors thrived, in part, because the clever ones ate rotten fruit that produced ethanol, more than 60 million years ago.

It was the alcohol from the fruit that protected their bodies from illness, and kept them nourished by producing extra calories. It seems we are hardwired to enjoy a gin and tonic, thanks to evolution.

That probably helps to explain why alcohol has played such an important role in everything — from parties to religious ceremonies — in almost every part of the globe for millennia.

Long-forgotten Chinese dynasties, the Incas, as well as Christianity, all managed to independently incorporate alcohol into their religious ceremonies over the years.

Whether it was a thousand different beers, or spirits such as Benedictine or Chartreuse, Christianity’s religious orders have generally found time to produce a good drink.

Personally, I’ve always suspected that the decline in organised religion in the West is linked with the decline of alcohol production, and a rather po-faced rejection of one of mankind’s oldest habits — a habit that predates organised religion itself.