A Brief History of Human Beverage Consumption: Prehistory to the Present

How did humans learn to drink? Are drinking preferences instinctive? How did humans learn which beverages were safe to drink? Did earliest humans watch and imitate the drinking behavior of animals? How would early humans know whether or not a pond of standing water was suitable to drink? At the dawn of human history, life spans were short, and illness that followed drinking polluted water would be associated with bacteria or toxins. Then, as now, aesthetics and a well-developed sense of smell, taste, color, and appearance determine our beverage selection as well as our place in natural selection. For a review of how color alters taste perception, see the chapter in this book by Spence.