Ancient people were just as smart as modern people, they just weren't as educated.
Humans are really good at figuring things out and tweaking things based off of previous results.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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They also had more free time to figure things out.
They also didn't have televisions, computers or phones to distract them. So they'd watch the stars or nature for entertainment and eventually, naturally see patterns and wonder what would happen if they applied those patterns for their own gain.
And less things to work with, so had to get creative to avoid diet fatigue (which is lethal) and only those creative enough people survived to create the people today.
A lot of fermented stuff like bread, cheese, wine and beer most likely started as "stuff forgotten in a pot" - not very complicated. In case of bread you need: two stones for milling the grain, a pot to mix it with water and store it, and then a fire to bake it. Not medieval tech, but way earlier.
Beer has been known since at least the bronze age, there are recipes known today, but the initial stage was, yet again, mill some grain, mix with water, forget in a pot.
Wine: forget some fruit in a pot.
Source: Reading history, plus my ADHD brain keeps forgetting stuff in the kitchen. I accidentally invented soda one of these days, because sometimes the forgotten stuff gets fizzy, too (you do need to invent the hermetically closing jar for that though, open clay pot doesn't work in that case)!
Btw one of my crazier theories (although I'm not the only person considering it) is that it wasn't us domesticating the world, but that we were domesticated by yeast. So it was inevitable that we kept producing vessels and feeding the fungus with sugar in ever more refined ways. Fungus wants to grow.
I always heard it was wheat that domesticated us
It was probably a range of plants and fungi seeking interaction with a species that could care for them and bring them to new places. Maybe wheat and yeast ganged up to control the apes? However the first plant humans propagated were fig trees, and apparently the first plant we grew in a gardening context was the bottle gourd (pot to ferment stuff in!) Maybe we find out one day which of those fuckers are responsible for us having credit scores and 9-5 now!!
you don't have to boil seawater to make salt. you let it evaporate in the sun.
Not in northern Europe you don’t, unless you want your salt diluted even more.
You have fallen for the myth that salt was rare and expensive in ancient times. Medieval people did know how to make salt out of seawater. There were salt works all over the coasts of Britanny and Normandy during medieval times. Salt was not rare or expensive, except that they did need a lot of it because it was one of their prime preservation ingredients, so they needed barrels and barrels of the stuff, and that could drive prices up. But it was not because they didn't know how to produce salt in enormous quantities.
Same goes for Roman times. The myth that salt was so rare and precious that it constituted part of the pay for a Roman soldier is wrong. It was because salt was such an important part of the diet and for preservation that it was given this way. They got grain and oil as well.
It’s also because salt is heavy as fuck, so transporting it from coasts and places with salt mines was expensive.
Check out the Wikipedia page on salt pools in the Camargue region of France. https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salins_d%27Aigues-Mortes
This dates back to antiquity.
Short as it is on the cosmic scale, history's been a pretty long time. Nobody found wheat and started making bread the next day. It was an incredibly long process that probably started with soaking the grains they were eating to make them more palatable and easier to consume. Then somebody thought to heat the wet grains. Then someone decided to crush the grains and you had porridge or gruel. A few iterations later someone comes up with a simple unleavened bread. Naturally-occurring yeast and dough left alone for a few hours could probably lead to rudimentary rising dough from there, and eventually we have brioche and marble rye.
How Bread Built Civilization: From the First Farmers to the Modern Factory [1 hour documentary]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=892yaBEwtbM
How Salt Shaped Society: From the Roman Empire to the French Revolution [53 minutes documentary]
You ever just boil some wheat then leave your leftovers in a jar too long?
All the f-ing time!
People already explained that salt was relatively easy to get, steps to make bread are not that complicated and probably occured through trial and error, and for ale, it's quite probably just cereals left to soak in water too long + natural yeast and you get an accidental alcohol. The trickiest part is to finetune the process to make it a bit consistent, but finding it out is very easy
Also once you have yeast going, keep that shit. It's easy enough to do for yogurt, beer, wine, and bread with some extra steps.
Shit once wine is fermenting you can usually just take some of it say 1/10th, sit it aside mash more grapes and throw it in and that fermentation will take hold on the new sugars and keep going. Beer shouldn't have been much different there. Bread starters you have to feed, but if you are making bread daily or a few times a week it'd be easy to keep.
Want to make yogurt, the easiest way it to buy yogurt, and use the end of it to start your batch.
Clearly it's some kind of [perpetual stew] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew?wprov=sfla1) of yeast, which would make a good name for an obscure local band of extreme metal
People needed beer because the water was not always safe to drink. The alcohol in beer kills parasites and bacteria that might make you sick. Even kids drank light beer in medieval times for this reason.
I believe that the the claim that medieval people needed to drink beer because water wasn't safe to drink is a bit of a myth. They built aquaducts, dug wells, etc.
As far as I understand it, it was more to do with preference (beer is great!) and calories. Beer was a good way to turn grains into easily quaffed liquid meals.