"The idea that’s gaining support at Göbekli Tepe was first proposed more than half a century ago: Beer, rather than bread, may have been the inspiration for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to domesticate grains. Eventually, simply harvesting wild grasses to brew into beer wouldn’t have been enough. Demand for reliable supplies pushed humans first to plant the wild grasses and then over time to selectively breed them into the high-yielding barley, wheat, and other grains we know today. Some of the earliest evidence of domesticated grain—an ur-wheat called einkorn—comes from a site a few dozen miles away from Göbekli Tepe. The coincidence is suggestive."The "beer-before-bread" theory of Neolithic agriculture has been around thirty years and more, but it's gained a lot of traction with recent archeological studies.
Further, fermentation produced a lot of nutrients that were otherwise missing from the diet of porridge, bread, and occasional chunk of meat for special occasions that was the daily fare once people did start settling down into city life in Mesopotamia.
