There is a pleasurable aspect of "getting drunk", but I personally wouldn't discount the food security angle either. Which is why I feel the "alcohol created civilization" argument is overkill. Fermented food can be stored for much longer times than fresh food. It's no surprise that many other non-alcoholic fermented foods have ancient histories. Same with other simple means of preservation (such as cured meat).

To give an example: Ancient beer (as mentioned in the Wiki on ancient Egyptian cuisine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_cuisine) was likely cloudy with lots of grain parts (not strained), and thus more nutritious than today's filtered beers. Even notwithstanding the hunter-gatherer aspect, I can see something appealing about having a source of readily available nutrition that you don't have to work for once prepared. With an added bonus that it can be transported over large distances, even to places where no food is available at all.

I don't entirely discount the "pleasure" angle, of course -- history after all records many examples of other psychoactive plants used since ancient times -- but in most cases, they are not food and were primarily used for ritual, medical, or social purposes. (This is still the case today.) The USA Today article is on a bit stronger ground when describing the coffee house's role in the Enlightenment.

Also domestication could have had a part, once you have a herd nomadic life is much harder and you need to tend to pastures.

Domestication also explains, why development has been slower in Africa. They had nothing to domesticate.

Is this a testable claim? Were, say, sheep progenitors easier to domesticate than ibexes or antelope or okapi?

It's a claim made by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Wikipedia has a pretty well cited section on "Behavioural preadaptation"[0] however I can't speak to its accuracy as I haven't read any of the literature.

I'd be pretty interested in seeing a domesticatability comparison of the guanaco (wild predecessor of the domesticated llama still in existence today) vs. the zebra.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_animals#Behav...

Well there's the American Natives, which are a conundrum because they both had hard animals to work with (I think they did manage to domesticate turkeys, but not buffaloes) but some still managed to farm and hybridize crops.

many points are debated here, there are also some links to start https://www.quora.com/Farming-Why-didnt-the-Native-Americans...

disclaimer: I know nothing of the subject and my initial hunch was pure conjecture.

There was a story on HN a few months ago. I do not have a reference, but it said, that all the African animals are either to dangerous or to fast. There are no horse, cow or pig equivalents. Some might seem like it but are actually not (like Zebras, look like horses, are actually very different).