Our happy hour fact to amaze your drinking buddies with.

Early man's quest for alcohol may have led to humanity's first farming communities.

Patrick McGovern, a bio-molecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, has uncovered evidence that man was brewing alcohol as far back as 7,000 B.C. He believes our ancestors stumbled onto hooch and liked it so much that they scaled back their antisocial hunter/gatherer ways, choosing instead to stay in one place long enough to grow domesticated crops that could be made into beer.

"Alcohol provided the initial motivation," explained McGovern. "Then it got going the engine of society." He also speculates that alcohol's role as a social lubricant helped create cohesiveness in these first beer-based communities.

Whether or not McGovern's theory on the origin of civilization holds any water, it's pretty clear beer, wine and spirits have helped keep the birth rate healthily above replacement for all these thousands of years.