Check out this amazing discovery about the origins of chocolate:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071112/ts_nm/chocolate_beer_dc

It would appear that chocolate began to be used in a beer-like drink in Central America around 1100 BC. “The earliest cacao beverages consumed at Puerto Escondido were likely produced by fermenting the sweet pulp surrounding the seeds,” the scientists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While this discovery is quite remarkable, I am quite saddened to find out that my idea to use beer as a means to improve my social standing is not original:

“What we’re seeing in this early village is a very early stage in which serving cacao at fancy occasions is one of the strategies that upwardly mobile families are using to establish themselves, to accumulate social prestige,” Henderson said in a telephone interview.

The daggone Aztecs beat me to it…

(Credit for discovery of this article goes to Princess Jax.)