Answer: Drinking Beer

Although it would be easy to think the drinking straw a thoroughly modern invention (and the plastic ones you grab at your local fast food place are most certainly a 20th century design), the earliest example of a drinking straw comes to us courtesy of a Sumerian tomb, some 5,000 years old, where both carvings and artifacts in the tomb indicate drinking straws were used by the royalty buried there. Based on this and additional evidence from the time period, historians believe the Sumerians used drinking straws as a convenient way to enjoy the simple beer they fermented while avoiding the solid by-products of fermentation.