Stone-age sauce



Archeologists have pushed back the timescale on the world's earliest hootch. The record was previously held by a discovery in Iran dating back nearly 7 & 1/2 thousand years (how ironic some of the world's oldest booze-making equipment was found in a land now run by virulently anti-alcohol Muslim clerics. Maybe they're so uptight because they really could murder a chilled beer?). Now the latest find pushes the earliest alcohol making back to 9,000 years BP (Before Present as is the normal notation these days in archeology and related fields - don't say this blog isn't occasionally educational) with a discovery in China. Basically making booze is at least as old as human civilisation and probably predates it. Cheers. Amazing the fascinating facts you can unearth when you're stuck at home with a miserable flu.