If the germ theory is relatively new, how do they think fermentation was happening (like wine, ale, yogurt etc.) thousands of years ago?
In: 613
For what it’s worth there are so many things in science and nature where we could observe that something happened reliably under certain conditions, enough to use it to our advantage, without knowing exactly why or how it worked.
We’re still kind of in that situation with gravity.
The yeast and bacteria present in fermentation is visible when it’s multiplying in the billions. People would collect the “mother” from a good fermentation and use it in the next. In selecting for the best yeasts and bacteria people bred strains that diverged from wild strains. Some might even call this domestication. This all happened well before germ theory. People knew what yeasts and bacteria were, they just didn’t know that it was made of billions of microscopic cells.
How do you think paint dries, grass grows or steam rises off of horse crap?
Folks back then had better things to do than ask ~~stupid~~ theoretical questions.
Just because germ theory is new doesn’t mean that germs are. People just had stuff happen. They decided they liked it, and recreated it. When that worked again, they kept it up and told others.
As others have said, yeast is everywhere and fermentation could be spontaneous. However, people have been keeping yeast for a long time even before they knew it was yeast or that they were keeping it.
One great example is the “yeast ring” or “yeast logs”. The basic concept is that wood has a lot of surface area, so pieces of wood would be placed in with a fermenting beverage.
By retrieving the wood from the batch, letting it dry, and using the same wood again next time, they were preserving a colony of yeast from batch to batch.
Did they know what yeast was? Not really, but they knew that reusing the same wood over and over made their fermentation work a lot better than leaving it to chance.
Adding to the general theme that you can just observe these things without knowing the cause: people were also figuring this stuff out over thousands and thousands of years. Developing recipes and processes of making food took literal generations of trial and error. We have all this science now for brewing and baking, but we basically just reverse engineered it from what early humans figured out completely through experimentation on a massive timeline.
Like it used to baffle me that we ever figured out *bread* knowing all the steps it required. And then I realized that (a) the first “bread” was probably real shit, and (b) that there was honestly enough time for it to just happen on accident like the monkeys with the typewriters.
There are a few different ways that fermentation could have happened without the knowledge of germ theory. One way is that fermentation is a naturally occurring process, so it is possible that it just happened without anyone knowing why. Another possibility is that people knew that fermentation happened, but they did not know the reason why it happened. It is also possible that people had a general idea that fermentation happened because of microorganisms, but they did not know exactly how it worked.
They thought things like this happened by a process called spontaneous generation. It’s exactly like it sounds. People believed that living things could spontaneously spring forth from matter without any sort of lineage. Basically, if they couldn’t see where it came from with their own eyes, it didn’t exist before then.
Where do you think the water into wine “miracle” came from?
The same way we know how to get into space via a rocket ship despite not knowing all there is to know about all related areas of physics.
It just works. Figuring out all the nitty-gritty stuff later doesn’t stop people from doing it to begin with, although you probably want a bigger knowledge base for something like sending shuttles into space.
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