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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 by at least a thousand years.

The five-year study, conducted by archeologists and chemists working under the direction of Patrick E. McGovern, an expert at the University of Pennsylvania on the history of fermented beverages, identified traces of the brews on shards of pottery excavated from Jiahu in the 1980s. As did the ancients in other parts of the world, the Chinese probably concocted the drinks, using rice, hawthorn fruits, wild grapes and honey, for religious libations. According to Zhang Juzhong, an archeologist at the University of Science and Technology of China, who discovered the shards, Jiahu's residents—who also made the world's earliest known musical instruments—"probably drank the wine to numb their minds and to help them commune with the divine." And given Chinese ingenuity, that probably wasn't all.

• Susan Jakes | Beijing
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