Earliest evidence of ancient mead found in northern China’s pottery

Story: 7000 B.C.E.  |  Last updated: January 8, 0001

Nearly nine thousand years ago, someone in what is now northern China mixed honey, rice, and water in a ceramic vessel and let nature do the rest. They may not have understood fermentation as a process, but what they produced — a honey-based alcoholic drink — left a chemical fingerprint that survived the millennia. That fingerprint, found in pottery shards, is the oldest physical evidence we have of ancient mead anywhere on Earth.

What the evidence shows

• Ancient mead: Chemical analysis of pottery vessels from northern China revealed signatures consistent with honey, rice, and organic compounds produced by fermentation — placing the earliest confirmed evidence of a honey-based fermented drink at approximately 7000 B.C.E.
• Fermentation chemistry: Researchers identified the presence of beeswax compounds and fermentation byproducts using residue analysis techniques, the same methods used to trace other ancient beverages in the archaeological record.
• Ceramic pottery link: The discovery coincides with the rise of Neolithic pottery in the region — the technology that made brewing and storing fermented liquids possible at scale for the first time.

Before the written word, there was the jar

The story of ancient mead is older than writing, older than cities, and possibly older than agriculture itself. Wikipedia’s entry on mead notes that spontaneous fermentation of honey may have occurred naturally for tens of thousands of years — wherever bees built hives and rain pooled inside them. But the northern Chinese pottery evidence, studied by archaeochemist Patrick McGovern and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania’s Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory, marks the first moment in the record where humans appear to have deliberately created and stored a fermented honey drink.

That distinction matters. Accidental discovery is one thing. A ceramic vessel purpose-built for fermentation is something else — it suggests knowledge, intention, and probably sharing.

The vessels came from the Jiahu site in Henan Province, one of the most significant Neolithic sites in East Asia. Jiahu is the same site where researchers found what may be the world’s earliest playable flutes and some of the earliest proto-writing symbols — suggesting a community engaged in music, communication, and now, apparently, brewing. These were not people on the margins of human development. They were, by the evidence, experimenters.

A drink that crossed every border

What makes the story of ancient mead remarkable is how widely and independently it seems to have appeared. The source material notes production in ancient Europe, Africa, and Asia. Norse mythology gave it mystical significance — the Mead of Poetry, drunk from the skull of the slain wise man Kvasir, was said to grant poetic genius. The Rigveda, one of Hinduism’s foundational texts and dated to roughly 1700–1100 B.C.E., contains what may be the earliest written reference to a soma-like honey drink. Ancient Greeks associated it with their golden age. Welsh bards sang of it. Anglo-Saxon warriors drank it in great halls.

The word itself traces through time like a migration map. The Proto-Indo-European root *médʰu appears in Old Norse, Sanskrit, Old English, and Proto-Slavic — and linguists have even traced the Chinese word for honey, mì (蜜), to Tocharian B, an extinct Indo-European language once spoken in Central Asia. A drink made from honey carried its name across continents and language families.

That kind of linguistic spread suggests mead was not just consumed but traded, shared, and taught — woven into the fabric of exchange between early human communities long before any of them left written records.

Lasting impact

The significance of the Jiahu find is not only that people were drinking something fermented nine thousand years ago. It is what that practice set in motion.

Fermented beverages required containers, which accelerated the development of ceramic technology. They required reliable honey sources, which encouraged early relationships with bee populations and likely contributed to the roots of beekeeping. The social role of shared drink — in ceremony, in feasting, in sealing agreements — shaped the architecture of early communities. Archaeological chemistry has shown that fermented beverages appear at some of the earliest known ritual sites, suggesting that the act of sharing altered states may have been tied to the formation of group identity and spiritual practice from very early on.

Mead eventually gave way to beer and wine as agriculture expanded and cheaper fermentable sugars became available. But it never disappeared. Monasteries in northern Europe kept brewing it through the medieval period when grapes couldn’t grow. And since the early 2000 C.E.s, mead has seen a commercial revival — there are now at least 850 commercial producers worldwide as of 2025 C.E., according to MeadWorld.

Nine thousand years is a long time for a drink to stay relevant.

Blindspots and limits

The pottery evidence from Jiahu shows chemical signatures consistent with a honey-rice fermented drink, but it cannot confirm a deliberate recipe, a standardized process, or an understanding of fermentation as a biological phenomenon. The broader claim — that mead may have been discovered 20,000 to 40,000 years ago — remains speculative, with no physical evidence yet to anchor it. The full history of fermented honey drinks across Africa, Mesoamerica, and South and Southeast Asia is also significantly underrepresented in the current archaeological record, meaning the northern China site may say more about where archaeologists have looked than where brewing actually began.

There is also the question of what these early fermented drinks cost communities — grain and honey were not infinite resources, and in lean years, fermenting food rather than eating it carried real trade-offs.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Mead: History

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

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• The Good News for Humankind archive on prehistory

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