Digging that Bronze Age Booze Find

If Darwin were alive today, he’d be 200 years old and fielding questions about how he cheated death, perhaps on the daytime talk circuit. He would've also born witness to the 'my great aunt was Irish and now I'm going to sport a fatuous plastic hat that I can later vomit into' that passes for St Patrick's Day on these shores.

Observing such debauchery would leave little doubt in anyone's mind (unless you’re Mike Huckabee) that humans are basically just like other animals.

One of us actually witnessed a trail of vomit that spanned the entire length of a subway car, and though we’re not gastroenterologists, judging by the puke’s fluid state, whoever did that should likely see one—or at least supplement their diet with a bit of fiber, perhaps all-bran.

By archaeological accounts, humans, prior to sullying mass transit and other public places with their innards, have been getting blotto for nearly 6000 years. The Bronze Age was a time, not only of unheeded dermatological warnings and the rise of George Hamilton, but when our forebears started using fancier tools to fell giant woolly mammoths (or dinosaurs, again if you're the aforementioned Mike Huckabee). Along with this increasing level of sophistication, the likes of which not seen either on New Year's or St Patty's Day, came the domestication of the grapevine.

The world's oldest bottle of wine, if you're interested, though it's not for sale and doesn't make for a nice table vintage even if it's given a few months to breathe, was unearthed during excavation near in a vineyard near the town of Speyer, Germany. It was inside one of two Roman stone sarcophaguses that were dug up, before it could be used by some dirty centurion to get some young maiden out of her toga. The bottle dates from approximately 325 A.D.

Recently, in Kent, UK another discovery corroborates the notion that we naked apes have been getting sh*t-faced and putting considerable effort into it, for several thousand millennia.

A 4000-year old Bronze Age skeleton with a pottery vessel placed at its feet was discovered, that researchers suggest was likely ‘a type of beer mug’. The body was in a "crouched" position, which is not only typical of the period, with knees drawn up to the chest, but typical of anyone who spent the morning of the 18th, genuflecting before the Porcelain God.