The Wikipedia version of the origin of agriculture is that, around 12,000 years ago, people in the eastern Mediterranean started cultivating grains and legumes.
If you think about how fermentation was discovered, it seems reasonable to think that an amount of some grain, possibly stored for future use, got wet and, being contained in some vessel, fermented. That presupposes that the grain was intended for a different use. If that is true, bread came before beer.
Right. The traditional theory is that fermentation may have been accidental, but the bread before beer thesis requires that fermentation was purposeful. The proponents of this theory present evidence that people were deliberately making beer at the time they started cultivating grains.
This comment is simple speculation.
If you think about how fermentation was discovered, it seems reasonable to think that an amount of some grain, possibly stored for future use, got wet and, being contained in some vessel, fermented. That presupposes that the grain was intended for a different use. If that is true, bread came before beer.
Right. The traditional theory is that fermentation may have been accidental, but the bread before beer thesis requires that fermentation was purposeful. The proponents of this theory present evidence that people were deliberately making beer at the time they started cultivating grains.