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Michael Shermer vs. "alternative history" Hancock and Crandall

King of the Americas said:
You are wrong- "It has no froth, is the colour of dark tea and carries an alcohol content of 10% - about double most contemporary beers.

Sakuji Yoshimura, an Egyptologist at Waseda University in Tokyo, helped transcribe the recipe from Egyptian wall paintings.

Kirin spokesman Takaomi Ishii said: "It has a taste very different from today's beer. It tastes a little like white wine."

-- BBC News, Brewers Concoct Ancient Egyptian Ale, 3rd August 2002

Original article: http://www.thekeep.org/~kunoichi/kunoichi/themestream/egypt_alcohol.html#.WgR-bLaZPYo#ixzz4xx4WdH7I
© Caroline Seawright
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And?
There was strong beer in the middle ages too.
But the bulk of the beer made and consumed was not strong.


King of the Americas said:
Forget the road. Use Google Earth as an explorative tool...
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Uh, the road is quite important because if that's an ancient ruin it has a bloody road running mere metres from it!
 
Tolls said:
And?
There was strong beer in the middle ages too.
But the bulk of the beer made and consumed was not strong.




Uh, the road is quite important because if that's an ancient ruin it has a bloody road running mere metres from it!
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ALRIGHT!!

Say it was HALF as strong...that's still 50 lbs of grain, per batch (*WHICH I HIGHLY DOUBT*), which means that 100lb bag made two batches...

THAT still means advanced agriculture.
 
King of the Americas said:
I understand ....
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You do not understand that GT is in Turkey not China :eye-poppi?

Very little evidence for residential use has been found at GT which is why it is considered to be a religious center.
Beer is has not evidence of any "settled, advanced, agrarian society" - especially when you want "advanced" to mean "globally connected" :eek:!
GT is evidence that a nomadic, simple, non-agrarian society could brew beer.

It is correct to state what we know something based on the current evidence because it is stupid to wait until we know 100% of anything to draw conclusions.
"Since GT lacks any evidence" is wrong. Not finding something is evidence that it is not there. There were no pink unicorns fond at GT thus we can be really sure that there are no pink unicorns at GT :D. More seriously:
  • No pottery found = this was a simple pre-pottery society.
  • No agricultural tools or cultivated plants found = this was a simple non-agrarian society.
  • No writing found = this was a simple pre-writing society.
  • No homes found = this was a simple non-residential (probably nomadic) society.
Beer can be brewed from wild grains. Basic beer is easy to brew - just seep wild grains in water and leave it to ferment with the natural yeast in the air. The very first beer could be when a group of hunter/gatherers were preparing wild grains in just that manner.

  1. 9 November 2017: Present your evidence of an "advanced agricultural civilization" at Göbekli Tepe (or acknowledge your assertion was wrong)
  2. 9 November 2017: Present your evidence of a "globally connected" civilization about 12,900 BP (start of the Younger Dryas).
  3. 9 November 2017: Present your evidence of a single civilization building pyramids globally about 12,900 BP (start of the Younger Dryas).
  4. 9 November 2017: Present your evidence that Easter Island is being re-dated and to about 12,900 BP (start of the Younger Dryas).
 
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Why do scientists not have a theory of an asteroid impact causing the Younger Dryas

King of the Americas said:
Did I say "comet"...?
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You did and I did not say you did. You said asteroid which is a theory that no one else seems to believe in. There will be reasons why working scientists do not support the idea of an asteroid impact in North America causing the Younger Dryas. I do not know them but an expert like you must know the reasons so:
10 November 2017: Why do scientists not have a theory of an asteroid impact causing the Younger Dryas?

A reference to a 3 hour long video is not your evidence. Present your evidence that you have, e.g. from the video.
 
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Are the ancient Egyptians the same civilization as the Aztecs

King of the Americas said:
"No, I am not your monkey."
....
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You are the "monkey" with the assertion that the pyramids everywhere in the ancient world are evidence of a globally connected civilization. This is an ignorant fantasy, a wrong idea or you have evidence to back it up.
9 November 2017: Present your evidence of a single civilization building pyramids globally about 12,900 BP (start of the Younger Dryas).

You missed the point of the pyramids I listed from the many differentcivilizations at many different times building pyramids so:
10 November 2017: Are the Egyptians from 2700 BC until around 1700 BC the same civilization as the Aztecs in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries?
 
King of the Americas said:
Do you know how much malted grain it takes to use 40 gallon primary fermenters??.
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Do you know that it is idiocy to think that Neolithic people used modern brewing technology to brew modern beer :eye-poppi?
All you need to brew a very simple beer is a container + water + wild grains + the yeast in the air. It would not be efficient and would produce a weak beer. But it would produce beer.
 
John Jones said:
Did Sitchen write that one too?
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Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) by Jared Diamond
Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity.
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Polynesia is not mentioned in the Wikipedia article but I assume there is something in his book about their migrations. Whether it is what King of the Americas asserts is dubious from a person with the record in this thread of unsupported assertions.
 
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John Jones said:
That seems like a lot, but is that much wild grain not available to them? Did they brew whole 40 gallons at at one time?
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The 40 gallons comes from Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze
Nestled inside the walls of some smaller enclosures are six barrel- or trough-shaped stone vessels. The largest could hold 40 gallons of liquid. The archaeologists suggest that they were used to brew a basic beer from wild grasses.
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The evidence is that there were gatherings of "hundreds of hunter-gatherers" so a kilogram of wild grain each should easily fill the pits with that "38 kg" per 40 gallons. Maybe a few hours work gathering grain for each person?
A possibility is that the construction and maintenance and rites for the site was a religious duty that included a "tithe", e.g. "come to work for X moons, bring food for yourself and wild grains for everyone's beer". So a hunter/gather would collect wild grains over a year and take a proportion of it to GT.
 
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Citation for "ovens for bread" at Göbekli Tepe

King of the Americas said:
That is a poop-ton of grain, for ONE fermenter, they found many, AND ovens for bread.
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10 November 2017: Citation for "ovens for bread" at Göbekli Tepe

What do the researchers at GT on 07/18/2017 say?
A younger layer is superimposed on this monumental architecture in some parts of the mound. This Layer II was dated to the early and middle PPN B. Smaller rectangular buildings of about 3 x 4 m with terrazzo floors are characteristic for this phase. They may be understood as minimized versions of the older monumental enclosures, as they share a common element – the T-shaped pillars. However, number and height of the pillars are considerably reduced: now often only two small central pillars are present, the largest among them not exceeding a height of 2 m. There are even rooms without any pillars. As with the large enclosures, no traces of domestic activities, e.g. hearths or ovens, have been detected so far. Thereafter, building activity at Göbekli Tepe seems to have come to an end. The uppermost Layer I consists of the surface soil resulting from erosion processes as well as a plough horizon.
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No ovens of any kind in that mound, the large enclosures or implied anywhere in the site.
But I am sure that King of the Americas has a credible source for his assertion.
 
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King of the Americas said:
If you were a brewer, you'd know that brewers adopt a fermenter that will accept 'common' yields for the crop or carb-source for your mash. I went from a 6 gallon to a 14 gallon primary fermenter, because my vineyard produced about 200 lbs of fruit.

Most home brewers stay in this range, because brew supply companies sell kits this size.

I'd bet that the GT brewers had 40 gallon fermenters because grain came in 100 lb sacks, because that is the maximum amount one man can carry on a shoulder.
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What you would bet about the GT brewers is worthless without evidence. If you chew grain and spit it into a jar, beer will result. Alpha-amylase in your saliva will convert starch in the grain into maltose. Wild yeast will start the fermentation of simple di and mono saccharides into alcohol.

Exposure to oxygen will spoil beer some of the time, but no one accused the residents of GT of making Fine Beer.

But I'm making no claims of expertise in ancient archaeology based on brewology. Why are you? Do you have any recipes from 10,000+ years ago?
 
John Jones said:
I'm not the one making claims of Gobekli Tepe's antiquity based on their purported capacity for brewing. That was you, remember?
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He is also continuing with the fantasy that Neolithic people used modern technologies, e.g. in the production of wort
The first step in wort production is to make malt from dried, sprouted barley. The malt is then run through a roller mill and cracked. This cracked grain is then mashed, that is, mixed with hot water and steeped, a slow heating process that enables enzymes to convert the starch in the malt into sugars. At set intervals, most notably when the mixture has reached temperatures of 45, 62 and 73 °C (113, 144 and 163 °F),[1] the heating is briefly halted. The temperature of the mixture is usually increased to 78 °C (172 °F) for mashout. Lautering is the next step, which means the sugar-extracted grist or solids remaining in the mash are separated from the liquid wort. In homebrewing, the malt-making and mashing steps can be skipped by adding malt extract to water.[2]
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We have to wonder how Neolithic people knew about the Celsius scale :).

The history of barley
Barley was one of the first domesticated grains in the Fertile Crescent, an area of relatively abundant water in Western Asia, and near the Nile river of northeast Africa.[23] The grain appeared in the same time as einkorn and emmer wheat.[24] Wild barley (H. vulgare ssp. spontaneum) ranges from North Africa and Crete in the west, to Tibet in the east.[3] The earliest evidence of wild barley in an archaeological context comes from the Epipaleolithic at Ohalo II at the southern end of the Sea of Galilee. The remains were dated to about 8500 BCE.[3] The earliest domesticated barley occurs at aceramic ("pre-pottery") Neolithic sites, in the Near East such as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B layers of Tell Abu Hureyra, in Syria. By 4200 BCE domesticated barley occurs as far as in Eastern Finland.[25] Barley has been grown in the Korean Peninsula since the Early Mumun Pottery Period (circa 1500–850 BCE) along with other crops such as millet, wheat, and legumes.[26]
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Göbekli Tepe was built in 2 phases. The first phase with the larger structures was during Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (c. 11,500 – c. 10,000 BP) before barley was domesticated. The second phase overlapped the domestication of barley in other places (PPNB was between 10,700 and ca. 8,000 BP or 7000 - 6000 BCE). However I see no sign of any domesticated barley at Göbekli Tepe.

ETA: Wild barley is not the only way to make simple beer - there is also wild wheat.
 
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Matthew Ellard said:
1) What is a wheat shard?
2) They found the wild grain residue in the beer vats
3) They found the unmade half carved pillars in the limestone quarry at Göbekli Tepe.
4) You don't know anything about Göbekli Tepe.
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King of the Americas said:
ALL from the latest sites, not the oldest, no?
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Think really hard. If they find an incomplete pillar, in the limestone quarry at Göbekli Tepe, will there be older quarrying underneath that stone left in location?
 

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King of the Americas said:
Read Guns, Germs, and Steel for a good breakdown of the Polynesian Island migration.
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I was speaking to a senior lecturer of Polynesian anthropology at the Bishop Museum, in Hawaii three month ago. We were discussing is Polynesians introduced potatoes into Eastern Asia before the Europeans.

You see, there's another nail in your coffin. Your international trade culture of 12,500 ago, "forgot" to exchange potatoes and tomatoes until about 800 years ago. :eek:
 
King of the Americas said:
So, how much time and space might it take to procure the grain to regularly produce 40 gallons of beer,
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What does the papers supplied to you state the wild grains were, found in the beer vats at Göbekli Tepe? What was their glucose content compared to modern beer grains. Did you forget that in your calculations?
 
Was this strained for 21 days? https://mobile.twitter.com/Madame_Kunta/status/525047518372323328/photo/1
Traditional beer is made like porridge, only thinner. It is drunk as soon as it has fermented, if need be through a straw packed with fibre as a filter. It takes a couple of days. Fermented porridge is popular too. The two things are much the same, originally; one consumed thicker, one thinner.

The collectors of wild grain can't make leavened bread. The make flat bread on a hot stone. Native Australians do that with wild millet seed to this day, and have been doing it for fifty thousand years. They never invented agriculture, but gather wild seeds in substantial quantity. If the gatherers have clay pots, or other vessels like gourds, they can make porridge. Make a batch of thin porridge, leave it to ferment a couple of days and consume it as gruel or beer. That's how it's done. The beer will be milky with unsettled sediment, but that's not a deterrent to the consumers.

ETA Now please respond to my cite of Shermer's criticism of Hancock where he asks why there is no evidence for any early advanced civilisation. That is Shermer's considered and expressed opinion. Now comment on it.
 
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King of the Americas said:
Start at the water hole, at that square...my google earth doesn't make that path as a road, and I see no modern tire tracks...
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What water hole? Maps show water as blue! The track crosses a dry lake bed.

It is Google Maps that has this track as
Unnamed Road
Mundowdna SA 5733, Australia
-29.737001, 138.367066
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That square looks like a fenced enclosure. We can see that there is much less vegetation? (assuming the black stuff is bushes) inside it so I suspect that cattle or sheep were quite recently kept in the enclosure.

Are you ignoring the other just about identical square with the track going through it and a fence line off to one side on Google Maps? This square is on Google Earth but the road has moved in the 2017 image.
 
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