It's a curious blog post. They've mashed together the synopses of two different books, one of which ("Sex at Dawn") claims that human monogamy began with agriculture, the other or which ("Uncorking the Past") expands upon Robert Braidwood's rather old idea that early agriculture was motivated by the desire to brew alcohol. I'm not sure I'd bother with "Sex at Dawn" - a ton of evolutionary psychology that covers this territory better. Braidwood's idea dates from the 1950s. I cite him in my paper on agriculture because he's the first, and to my knowledge only author other than me who posits a non-nutritional primary motive for adoption of agriculture.
I updated his idea by talking about drugs other than alcohol, and then went a step further by saying that the pharmacological effects thus obtained enable the social changes that occur in societies that adopt cereal agriculture. There's a synopsis of my idea at http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff//gwadley/msc
Greg, one question about your comment. Why do you think beer is "non-nutritional?" I don't believe they were being clever when they called it "liquid bread." The early, unfiltered beer that would have been made at that time would have a number of nutritional advantages, not least of which would be that it was safer to drink than water.
In Australia, beer probably has close to zero nutritional value, being essentially cold lager/pale ale. (It has to primarily serve the purpose of cooling the drinker down.) Traditional English ales or stouts, however, could have been more nutritious.
shall I be the first to say: isn't this 'new theory' what my brother's been banging on about for the last 15 years?