The 25,000-Year-Old Teeth That Just Rewrote The History Of Human Drug Use

The Raqefet Cave beer appears to have been brewed for ceremonial purposes — for feasting rituals — rather than as a daily beverage.

This 13,000-year-old beer was already notable for pushing back the evidence of fermented beverage production significantly earlier than the agricultural period to which it had previously been assigned.

It suggested that the relationship between humans and intoxicants was not a simple consequence of having surplus grain — you need surplus grain to brew beer at scale — but something that predated the agricultural foundation for that surplus.

The Sulawesi discovery pushes the timeline back much further, and in a different direction.