Stone Age Origins for Wine?

Wine is very popular - and it might be very old, far older than has been generally believed up to now. Scientists are trying to determine just how old wine making is and so far it can be dated back to at least Neolithic times.

William Cocke writes for National Geographic News:

[Patrick] McGovern is attempting to establish the origin of the earliest Neolithic viniculture—where grapevines were cultivated and winemaking developed. By comparing DNA from the wild grape with that of modern cultivars, McGovern and his colleagues hope to pinpoint the origin of domestication. ... "We're looking in eastern Turkey, because that's where other plants were domesticated," McGovern said in a telephone interview before his trip. "We're going out there to collect wild grapevines with local cultivars, so we can see what the relationship is and maybe make a case that this is where the first domestication occurred."

Neolithic eastern and southeastern Turkey seems to have been fertile ground for the birth of agriculture. "Einkorn wheat appears to have been domesticated there, one of the so-called Neolithic founder plants—the original domesticated plants that led to people settling down and building towns," McGovern explained. "So all the pieces are there for early domestication of the grape."

Sounds fascinating — I wonder if the earliest wines were used more for recreation, general consumption, or perhaps for religious purposes? At a time when people couldn’t have had much alcohol tolerance, it probably didn’t take much for people to start feeling strange and tipsy. How did they interpret it? Did they think something was wrong with them? Did they believe that they were being possessed by some outside force?

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