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
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.
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.
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.
Spot on, man, kill the bad bacteria. Big part of early sailing from what I understand too. Watery alcoholic drinks were safe to drink in most ports. Y’see Margaret? I’m an adventurer, no a drunk, you gabby twit!
Think of it this way,
You don’t need to know gravity works for it to do its job. You drop a ball, it falls to the ground.
Likewise if you crush grapes and let them sit they will ferment. You have wine.
You don’t need to know that there is natural yeast on the grape that eats the sugars in the grape converting it to alchohol.
You just need to know if you if you crush grapes, let them sit, and eat/drink them it makes you feel funny.
The description of how “minute bodies” enter the body and cause diseases by Ibn
Khatima were well in advance of Pasteur’s discovery of microbes.
fermentation happens naturally all the time in wild fruits, humans saw this, studied the phenomenon and took it from there
Most medieval and before cultures didn’t really know why a lot of things happened, they just knew that they did happen. Call it a blessing from God(s). They essentially found out that the process we know to be fermentation happened under certain conditions and then that knowledge was passed on down the generations. Its pretty crazy to think that until maybe 300 years ago we didn’t really know why anything happened, just that it did.
IMO you can just believe that before figuring out the true nature of ANYTHING, humanity just believed that it worked by MAGIC.
So, the answer is: MAGIC.
There was a very interesting superstition before they knew all the science behind distilling, when they brought in a new still to replace the old, they would hit it with a hammer to put dents in it to match the old as a superstitious thing, and now we know that in fact, the size and shape of the still do play a part in how it works, so doing this actually had a function, they just didn’t necessarily know it.
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