Way Downstream …

        Beer came up so often last week in the Senate Supreme Court drama that television viewers should have been holding drinking contests.

        (“I like beer. Still like beer,” nominee Brett Kavanaugh said, one of his 30 references in his testimony to beer.)

        While embracing a cold one, Kavanaugh might like to ponder the fact that beer has been around even longer than the Western concept of jurisprudence.

        We at Bay Weekly, who devour obscure journals like alcoholic beverages, learned from the September edition of the Journal of Archaeological Sciences that hunter-gatherers of long ago were microbrew connoisseurs.

       From 13,000-year-old residues on stone mortars at the site of a graveyard in what is now Israel, the team found that the Natufian people may have brewed enough beer to keep the kegs of Kavanaugh and his pals full for at least the summer of ’82.

      “This accounts for the oldest record of man-made alcohol in the world,” said team leader Li Liu.