Coffee Was Discovered Thanks to Dancing Goats?
The story that the first human to consume coffee was inspired by witnessing goats dancing after eating coffee berries has been told since at least the 17th century. The earliest known version of the claim was published in 1671. However, because no primary-source records describing the origin of the human consumption of coffee are known to exist, there is no hard evidence either for or against the story.
For years, a claim has circulated online that humans first began ingesting coffee due to a goatherd noticing his goats dancing after eating coffee berries — the small, round fruits of the coffee plant. Coffee berries contain the seeds — generally referred to as coffee beans — that are roasted, ground, and steeped in water to produce the caffeinated beverage known as coffee.
Claim – Humans were inspired to consume coffee when a goatherd noticed his goats dancing after eating coffee berries centuries ago.
The claim appeared in numerous posts on X, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms. One March 2023 TikTok video featuring the claim had amassed more than 346,000 views and 33,700 likes as of this writing.
@henrybelcasterThe invention of coffee? original sound – Henry Belcaster
But the claim did not originate online. The earliest recorded written version of the story dates to 1671, when a monk and scholar named Antonius Faustus Naironus wrote a Latin treatise on the health benefits of the beverage, which was introduced to Europe via the Ottoman Empire around a century earlier.
Translated into English in 1710 as “A Discourse on Coffee: Its Description and Vertues,” Naironus’ treatise said coffee was discovered by “a certain Person that look’d after Camels, or, as others report it, Goats,” who noticed “that his Herds twice or thrice a Week not only kept awake all Night long, but spent it in frisking and dancing in an unusual Manner.”
According to Naironus, the camel or goat herder sought guidance from a local religious leader, who “resolv’d to try the Vertues of these Berries himself,” boiled them in water and drank the result, which he found kept him awake and able to pray all night.
Notably, according to Naironus, this story took place in the “Kingdom of Ayaman” (modern Yemen) rather than Ethiopia, where many modern versions of the claim have been set.
As explained in the Britannica entry for the history of coffee, wild coffee plants are native to Ethiopia, but their widespread cultivation for consumption in beverage form is generally believed to have begun in Yemen at an unknown date.
In the centuries after Naironus’ story was first published, versions of it circulated widely in English-language books and magazines, including but not limited to an 1835 schoolbook for children, an 1866 issue of the Illustrated Magazine, and in U.S. Department of Agriculture publications dated 1912 and 1964. In several of these stories, the goatherd was given the name Kaldi, which did not appear in Naironus’ account.
In short, however, there is no conclusive proof humans were inspired to consume coffee after watching goats eat coffee berries. The authors of modern books about the history of coffee have been clear that there is no evidence the dancing goat story is anything more than one of several legends about the origin of the human consumption of coffee.
For this reason, we have rated this claim as a “Legend.”
For example, Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, the authors of the 2001 book “The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug,” described the dancing-goat story as a “myth,” noting that it had become “the coffee origin story most frequently encountered in Western literature.”
Similarly, Morton Satin, the author of the 2011 book “Coffee Talk: The Stimulating Origins of the World’s Most Popular Brew,” wrote (archived): “It is impossible to say with any certainty how valid the story is.”
(Google Books)
The reason for this is that there are no known primary-source documents that recorded the origin of the human consumption of coffee. As noted in the entry for “Coffee” in the “Oxford Companion to Food,” the earliest known written mention of coffee appeared in a 10th-century Arabic work by the physician Rhazes, who was also known as Al-Razi.
By the time of Rhazes’ account, humans may have been cultivating and consuming coffee for centuries. Additionally, as mentioned above, the first known written version of the dancing goat story appeared even later, in the 17th century.
To explain the persistence of the story, one Reddit user, who responded to a November 2023 r/AskHistory post asking whether there was any real evidence to back it up, said:
A lot of people believe it because it’s extremely plausible. All the boxes are checked, even when you look into the details. The area is generally believed [to have been] somewhere between the horn of Africa and Southern Arabia. Coffee bushes did grow wild in those areas. A goat herder makes far more sense because goats could potentially [be] herded through the hilly regions where coffee tends to grow.
As that Reddit user noted, the claim coffee was discovered thanks to dancing goats is plausible, in the sense that it offers a logical explanation for how humans first developed an interest in consuming coffee and contains no elements that can be disproven easily, if at all.
However, plausibility is not the same thing as proof, and, ultimately, there is no hard evidence to either support or disprove the claim that humans began to drink coffee after observing the dance moves of goats who had eaten the caffeine-containing seeds of coffee berries, which is why we rated this as a “Legend.”
Legend: This rating is most commonly associated with items that describe events so general or lacking in detail that they could have happened to someone, somewhere, at some time, and are therefore essentially unprovable.
