Imagine being the neolithic lad who discovered beer. Though I bet it was a lass, and he just claimed the bragging rights. She was probably starving. The mammoths had skedaddled. Him-indoors was wailing in his goat-skins about an empty belly.

The Stone Age supermarket (aka the forest) was having a famine. All there’s left to eat is some gnarly gruel - watery and bubbly - that you wouldn’t touch with the business end of a giant sloth. Barley porridge. Manky the first time, but a week later like something a shaman did after a night on the shrooms.

Anyway, that’s all there is, so Stone Age Queen and her baby-daddy get it down them, glugging the slop straight from the wood pot. Ten minutes later, they’re the first people on Earth to get steaming. Now all they have to do is invent the kebab for the perfect night out.

Read more by Neil Mackay

May the ancient gods bless her. She’d accidentally discovered fermentation.

This, incidentally, is genuinely how anthropologists think humans started drinking beer.

Fast forward 10,000 years and there’s still five bottles of Covid lager under my stairs that will go off like an atomic bomb and take out my eyes if I open one.

I brewed this during the original lockdown. When I cracked the top off the first bottle it exploded, showering me, the kids, my missus and the kitchen. It came out quite treacly, so the place looked like an anti-vax Dirty Protest.

Beer - sweet, soothing, delicious beer - will be still with humanity in another 10,000 years. It’ll be with us until we die out.

When the last human sits on a darkening Earth, as........

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