When did people stop being drunk all the time?

Re:When did people stop being drunk all the time? by dmurray on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:23AM (#36873760)

This was my understanding too, but the article in the first footnote uses some much larger values for alcohol content. It generally seems well sourced but these numbers are all over the place as if the author first got the numbers and then randomly placed the decimal point and termed some of them 'percentages'.

> Wine is taken to be 0.12 alcohol, the same number is used in modern estimates of alcohol consumption. The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol in “small beer” is taken to be around 0.05 and the % in “strong beer” is taken to be around 0.135,

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:When did people stop being drunk all the time? by SCdF on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:43AM (#36873888)

This is the first article that has implied that this historical beer consumption was this high % wise, so I am suspicious of the phrasing "taken to be" that is used all over the place. IDK if this means something specific in the context of scientific papers, but in conversational English it can be interpreted as "a number I made up".

[ Parent | on HN ]