[virtualsue]

Likewise, I had a brief conversation with the fascinating Dr Lewis Dartnell where we discussed the origin of barley farming. Did our ancestors grow it for food, and accidentally discover that you can also make beer with it, or did the beer come first and bread second? I had assumed the former, but now that I think about it...

[xanthopan]

i'd bet that proto-beer and proto-bread appeared around the same time, and techniques were developed over generations to calibrate different recipes until they resembled what we might recognize as "beer" and "bread" today.