Ch. Jiahu, with Hawthorn Accents

China has long prided itself on having come up with many of the world's most important inventions. Now the country that gave us gunpowder, paper money and the noodle can claim responsibility for another of human civilization's highest achievements: we have the Chinese, or at least their distant ancestors, to thank for cocktails. According to a report released last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S., residents of the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Henan province were raising toasts with fruit wines and rice spirits in 7000 B.C.usurping Iran's first place in the tipple timeline...