By Thomas H. Maugh 2d Los Angeles Times Humans began exploiting cacao beans for alcohol before they started using them to make chocolate, according to new findings that push the earliest known use of cacao back about 500 years. Residue scraped from pottery vessels dating to 1400 to 1100 B.C. indicates that residents of Honduras' remote Ulua Valley fermented the sweet pulp of the chocolate plant to make an alcoholic drink well before they began grinding the bitter seeds and mixing them with honey and chiles to produce the equivalent of modern cocoa. The consumption of fermented cacao is much...
photo: WN/ Sweet Radoc
