by Christopher Underkofler

Created on: June 14, 2008   Last Updated: November 07, 2008

Fermented honey and water, traditionally called mead, may have a surprising origin which may dates back an incredible forty-five thousand years.

In the ancient time period from 45,000 to 20,000 years ago, which anthropologist have named the Upper Paleolithic Era or Late Stone Age, both circumstantial and hard archaeological evidence is slowly accumulating which suggests that our ancestors accidentally discovered how to make the fermented concoction we call mead.

Peoples from the Late Stone Age were fully modern human beings. They produced exquisite cave art paintings, wide varieties of refined, flaked blade tools and weapons, and traveled to nearly every habitable corner of their of the world. There were, undoubtedly, innumerable perishable items created from organic sources such as plant and animal materials which have not survived to the present.

In order to travel so extensively most anthropologists presume that they must have had rafts or canoes of some fashion. None have ever been found. Our ancestors were successful at meeting all of their short and long-term physical, social and spiritual needs. Language and culture had already been our hallmark for over sixty thousand thousand years, and we were smart. We had learned to meet all of our needs with time left over to try new things and vary their diet.

Just as large predators such as lions and tigers and bears had to be dealt with and eliminated from the local square miles around tribal settlements, so did small flying, stinging insects like honey bees which decided to take up residence close to our ancestors. Honey bees habitually make their hives in elevated locations where there is a small entrance to a secure and enclosed space. The height can be as low as the height of a man if that is where the queen has decided to reside. Hollows in tree trunks fit this bill and this is where we often find wild hives to this day. In their industry to remove a pest, ancient peoples found that the waxy comb concealed a sweet treasure. But how to get it?

The best evidence anthropologists have consists of rare samples of preserved wood from ancient fig trees from Turkey, near the sites of Upper Paleolithic settlements. The wood dates to almost forty thousand years. Extensive chemical analysis has revealed traces of honey. What's more, there is evidence of select compounds which can only be produced when in the presence of ethyl alcohol and water in an acidic environment. There are also the semi-fossilized remains of honey bees whose tissues show signs of being dissolved in some sort of ethyl alcohol solution.

What has been deduced from these lines of evidence? People probably waited until evening, when bees rest together in the hive, and poured much water into the fig trunk opening where a hive existed in order to drown the bees. The water would have set in there for many months if there was no exit leak. The fig wood would have slightly acidified the water which sat inside the trunk and dissolved some of the honey from the comb. Natural yeasts in the environment would have set to work fermenting the solution into a honey-based, alcoholic liquid after months and months had passed. Today, simple mead is recreated with honey, acidified water, natural yeasts, and allowed to ferment for a very long time at ambient temperatures. You decide. Circumstantial evidence or case closed?

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