Alcoholic drinks are older than written history
Wine residues from roughly 6000 BCE in Georgia and 5000 BCE in Iran push fermentation deep into prehistory. Beer may reach Neolithic Europe by 3000 BCE. Humans were brewing social life—and risk—into liquids for more than eight thousand years before soda cans existed.
A drink is any liquid meant for people to swallow. Water is the base; milk, juice, soft drinks, coffee, tea, and cocoa fill daily cups, while ethanol drinks have shaped culture for millennia. Thirst, steered by the hypothalamus, marks dehydration; without water, death comes faster than from losing any other substance except oxygen. Contaminated water still carries disease—WHO notes that improving environments, especially safe water, could prevent about 94% of diarrhea deaths among the 1.8 million infectious diarrhea deaths yearly. Pasteurization heats then cools milk to cut pathogens that otherwise make it a top dietary infection risk in rich countries.
Preparation invents variety: filtration and chlorination for water; crushing and pressing for juice and wine; infusion and percolation for tea and coffee; carbonation for sparkle; fermentation turning sugar to ethanol; distillation concentrating spirits; cocktails mixing spirits with sugar, bitters, or juice. Soft drinks legally sit near zero alcohol—UK "alcohol-free beer" is under 0.05% ABV. Only about 3% of Earth’s water is fresh, and less than 1% of that fresh supply is cheaply reachable at the surface or underground. Westerners often take water cold; Chinese custom often prefers it hot.
Coffee plants grow in more than seventy countries; credible drinking evidence appears in fifteenth-century Yemeni Sufi settings, after earlier ceremonial use in East Africa. Hot chocolate descends from Maya drinks 2,500–3,000 years ago and Aztec xocōlātl by 1400 CE, later medicinal in Europe. Greek symposia and Roman convivia organized social drinking; some faiths ban alcohol while others deified it. Thomas Henry sold early artificial sparkling drinks in the late 1770s; today Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Dr Pepper Snapple dominate sodas. From Georgian wine jars to bottled cola, beverages remain how cultures manage thirst, status, and stimulation.
Source: Drink
