Ships and distilleries also used cats to keep rodents at bay. The Glenturret distillery in Scotland even commissioned a statue of their cat Towser after her passing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/09/09/347093135/...

I like your position that alcohol was the reason we switched to agrarian lifestyles.

It's not a statement that should be taken any more seriously than a flippant quip in informal conversation.

The story of humans adopting farming is complex, happened multiple times in multiple places, and different societies had very different priorities, methods, and environments to work within. In that context, saying we all did it to get drunk is a bit nonsense.

One of the more interesting things you can read about is how we've found some neolithic settlements that practiced farming for a few centuries, before returning to nomadic hunter gatherer status.

It's pretty clear the primary motivation was simply maintaining caloric intake in changing habitats, not specifically brewing bear, though the Sumarians were quite into that. In fact the oldest remains of what we might call "beer" that have been found were essentially naturally fermented porridge: very thick in consistency. So it seems pretty clear the porridge came first, at least in the Levant.

Sounds more plausible than "we did it for the porridge".

But probably because you could feed ten times the population, develop better tech, and pound to a pulp any neighbors who didn't follow suit.

It and wine also killed bacteria in water so allowed larger communities to form.

In the middle ages beer watered down to .5-1% alcohol was had when water supplies could not be guaranteed to be fresh

You know, this is something people mention a lot on the internet since forever, and it reminds me of the assumption that mouthwash which is 20-25% alcohol must be for the purpose of killing germs.

However, I recently read something that claimed to debunk this, saying that even 50 proof is not effective at all at sterilizing things and it is merely a solvent for the active ingredients.

The reason I stumbled on it was because I'd been worrying about whether the alcohol free variants are effective, vs. alcohol potentially being a carcinogen.

So I think it's less obvious what effect 1% alcohol has than at first glance.

I did consider not posting that factoid. I had been a while since I double checked it. You're right, now that I think about it more. I'm inclined to no longer believe that statement to be true but I wonder if a single digit percentage of alcohol could be enough to stave off more advanced stages of exponential growth of bacteria for a meaningful amount of time like, say, a day.

Nevertheless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer

I always thought they were watering the beer down so you could drink it in place of water so you wouldn't be inebriated after breakfast.

It was debunked time and time again. People in ancient times drank water, it's just that reading ancient texts gave some historians the idea that people only drank beer, since that was the only drink they wrote about(well, along with wine). No one wrote about drinking water because there was no reason to write about it. But modern historians are very much certain that the "they only drank beer because it was safer" thing is a myth, we don't have any proof for that.