"When chimpanzees eat ripe figs and other fruits in the wild, it's a surprisingly boozy feastthe fruit they consume in a day contains the equivalent of a couple of adult beverages. That's the upshot of a new study on the alcohol content of the preferred foods of one of our closest living relatives. The findings, published today in the journal Science Advances, may have implications for understanding human attraction to alcohol."
"Some 25 years ago Robert Dudley of the University of California, Berkeley, who was studying monkeys at the time, proposed the drunken monkey hypothesis, which holds that we humans inherited our love of alcohol from our primate ancestors. The idea was that our primeval predecessors would have encountered ethanolthe form of alcohol found in wine, beer and spiritsin the fruit they ate, and evolved ways to exploit this resource."
Wild chimpanzees eating ripe figs and other fruits ingest ethanol in amounts equivalent to several adult alcoholic beverages per day. Fruit makes up about 75 percent of chimp diets in Uganda and Cote d'Ivoire, with average consumption near ten pounds daily. The drunken monkey hypothesis proposes that ancestral primates encountered ethanol in ripe fruit and evolved attraction to it because ethanol signals ripeness and higher sugar content, aiding calorie intake. Earlier data on ethanol content in nonhuman primate foods were limited; measurements of ethanol in preferred fruits show notable levels, implying ancestral dietary exposure to alcohol could influence human attraction to it.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]