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As a parent of older teenagers, one question that sometimes comes up in my house is why humans have such fondness for alcohol, despite its sometimes unpleasant after-effects.
The idea was originally put forward in a 2014 book, The Drunken Monkey: Why we drink and abuse alcohol, by Professor Robert Dudley, a biologist at UC Berkeley in California, although it is not yet universally accepted.
That’s mainly thanks to the existence of fruit. Around 100 million years ago, plants started packaging their seeds inside tasty and calorific fruits, so they would be dispersed by animals.
Alcohol is a smaller and lighter molecule than sugar so it floats into the air. In hot and humid rainforests, above a tree laden with ripe fruit there will be an “ethanol plume”.
It could even reveal which kind of tree is releasing the plume, because ethanol reacts with other complex molecules within the fruits, which vary with the species. “Ethanol is this broad, non-specific signal, and the closer the animal gets to the source of fermentation, the more layers there are of these smells,” said Maro.
Alcohol has become important for social bonding among many humans (Photo: Azman Jaka/Getty)
Monkeys feasting on boozy fruit
It is difficult to investigate because it would be unethical to give wild or captive primates alcohol, said Dr Kimberley Hockings, a chimpanzee expert at the University of Exeter.
Dr Hockings, for instance, has documented wild chimps eating fermenting breadfruit and sometimes sharing it with each other.
At two different sites where wild chimps live, in Uganda and Ivory Coast, they recorded which fruit species the animals ate, and the quantities, and measured their alcohol content.
They found that chimps are consuming about 14 grams of ethanol a day on average, which would be equivalent to a human having two glasses of wine. The research was published in the journal, Science Advances.
Chimps can use alcohol as an energy source, as can people. Indeed, an enzyme that breaks down alcohol changed to become much more efficient in our primate ancestors about 10 million years ago, it was discovered earlier this year.
At the time when the upgraded alcohol enzyme appeared, our ancestors had begun spending less time in the trees and more time on the forest floor, which ultimately led to walking on two legs.
Long history of use
Seen in light of this evolutionary history, it now becomess less surprising that most modern-day humans – although not all – are partial to a drink.
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Of course, our history with alcohol doesn’t mean we should feel free to drink as much as we want of it today.
On the other hand, perhaps getting drunk reflects a different aspect of our nature – the urge to take mind-altering drugs, said Dr Lorenzo Stafford, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth.
Rising obesity rates are widely viewed as the biggest health crisis facing the Western world. Prevention is better than cure, so doctors are focused on stopping children from getting overweight.
I’ve been watching
Department Q is a brilliant new crime drama on Netflix. At first you think it will be yet another series featuring a grumpy cop with psychological scars, but make sure you watch to the end of the first episode. Then, things take a more interesting turn.
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