The earliest inventions - fire, baws and arrows, wheeled carts - are the most difficult to place in time. New excavations and methods of analysis can overthrow the hoariest of received opinions on who invented what when. A case in point is the first manufacture of wine.
Chemists at the University of Pennsylvania put the issue to the test by analyzing the reddish residue with infrared spectroscory, a method that distinguishes chemicals by the wavelengths of light they absorb. They found that the residue was rich in tannic acid, an organic substance found almost without exception in grapes. Badler was proven right and the date for the invention of wine was pushed back five hundred years.