In fact, some workers who built ancient civilizations spent their entire wage at Happy Hour, it has emerged.

According to New Scientist, the newly-discovered ‘world’s oldest paycheck’ — written in a picture language known as cuneiform — was cashed in beer.

A 5,000-year-old tablet found in the city of Uruk in modern-day Iraq, includes the symbols for “ration” (a human head eating from a bowl) and “beer” (a conical vessel): “Scattered around are scratches recording the amount of beer for a particular worker. It’s the world’s oldest known payslip, implying that the concept of worker and employer was familiar five millennia ago.”

Experts believe this is evidence that in this early civilisation to emerge in Mesopotamia there were already concepts of workers and employers.

Before this human society revolved around sharing of the chores and resources that accompanied small scale farming and hunting.

Speaking to New Scientist, Dr Ian Hodder, an anthropologist at Stanford University in California, said: “There was a change from social sharing to hierarchies.

“This was an inevitable consequence of living in large communities and intensifying agricultural production.”

Uruk was an ancient city of Sumer and later Baylonia during the early Bronze Age of Mesopotamia.

It is thought to have shifted from a small cluster of agricultural villages to a large urban centre over a period of around 8000 years between 4,000 and 3,200 BC.